Industry Thought Leadership

Last few years business ‘have seen unprecedented growth of AI and Automation. CSPs are also participating in the bandwagon driven by needs of Customer acquisition and Customer Experience.
As per McKinsey’s online survey which ended in June 2021, garnered, responses from 1,843 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures it clearly indicates that

AI adoption is continuing its steady rise:
56 percent of all respondent’s report AI adoption in at least one function, up from 50 percent in 2020.
The Middle East has remained one of the early adopters of tech and AI innovations.

Next decade 5G will define the direction for the CSPs. Around the world, 5G commercial launch is getting accelerated as organizations are digitizing faster than ever. 5G will enable the services which will touch every facet of life- health, work, home luxuries, education, transportation, etc. The range of services that 5G will offer will need speed, efficiencies, availability, and reliability with an ever-increasing demand for prodigious customer experience.

Such gigantic requirements would need flexible, scalable, agile, and adaptive networks with effective management of the resources at the edge too. The networks must adopt the technologies such as cloud-native, dynamic network slicing, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), smart IP network, ultra-high bandwidth, and AI-enabled end-to-end 5G services. To achieve dynamicity, AI is the holy grail that can ensure appropriate actions for the predefined expectations, learn, and evolve to cover a variety of scenarios and business processes. The evolution of deep learning, neutral networks, and reinforcement learning promises to solve very complex problems. Hand-in-hand with data analytics and visualization techniques, CSPs can study the characteristics of networks, develop deep insights about the behavior of the networks and implement the right AI technologies.
The time is ripe to use AI with other technologies to address the optimal design of the physical layer, complex decision-making, network management, and resource optimization tasks in 5G networks.

Tech Mahindra has developed an end- to-end innovative, secure, and automated cloud Platform called “netOps.ai”, powering Telco Networks to empower operators to accelerate digital transformation and enable rapid deployment of 5G Networks. The details can be accessed at netOps.ai – Powering Telco Networks.

The different functions in CSPs are also ramping up to cater to evolving business needs. CMOs are under continuous pressure to innovate new products, improve customer retention, improve campaign effectiveness and increase customer satisfaction. CDOs and CIOs are in dire need to improve infrastructure, reduce human dependencies, release low productive assets, improve customer response time, proactively reduce customer calls and reduce revenue leakages. Implementation of integrated and ingrained AI and Automation has helped innovate and terminate many long-standing issues.

As per the surveys by Gartner, Delloite and PWC the functions where AI have taken firm positions are:

• Operations
  - Service-operations management and optimization
  - Contact-center automations - moving toward more predictive actions
• Growth and Customer Experience
  - New Product-features and optimization
  - Churn management, Campaign management, Customer-service analytics and Customer segmentation
• Risk modeling and analytics
• Fraud and debt analytics

Tech Mahindra has been an early adopter of AI and Automation with a mature assessment methodology for CSPs to baseline and identify the business processes that can be automated and improved using AI. Tech Mahindra is successfully delivering many programs which are helping customers to achieve significant quantified benefits. In ASEAN and Europe region, Tech mahindra worked with CSPs to improve their net promoter scores (NPS) by identifying the issues in the network and customer care centers. The identification led to automation and improvements of many processes that helped CSPs position themselves as the preferred CSPs in the Geography. In another use case, we digitized the old contract documents so that AI robots read the documents resulting the re-rating of many contracts, and therefore an increase in the top line by 0.5%. The usecase was enhanced to identify the orders that exceed the defined cycle time to improve the revenue realization and recover the bills for the uncharged used services. The solution was automated and designed to learn and improve. Numerous benefit-driven usecases leverage AI and Analytics to make organization processes smarter every day.

“As per stats, the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence in the Middle East will reach $320 billion by 2030. Additionally, with the current AI trends in the Middle East, we can expect annual growth of 20 to 34% across the area.

CSPs who are advance in AI adoption are in a journey to Industrialize the AI. Tech Mahindra is implementng AI Assets registers, complete MLOPs journies, AI governance and democratization. Tech Mahindra invested in open source platform ACUMOS.org and has built an enterprise version GAiA™. GAiA™ is the enterprise AI/ML platform offering from Tech Mahindra, built upon the open-source Acumos™ platform for an enhanced end-to-end CX. Acumos™ is an open source AI lifecycle management platform, co-created by Tech Mahindra & AT&T in collaboration with Linux.Foundation.

Tech Mahindra’s Subsidiary Comvivia used AI powered platforms to solve real time marketing automation and to enable the finance inclusion, MobiLytix™ Real Time Marketing. It is an AI powered real-time interaction management and multi-channel marketing automation platform that delivers proven top-line results for CVM marketers.

Yabx, aims to enable the underserved with limited credit history to get fair access to financial services tailored to their needs. Yabx's core purpose is financial inclusion, and it manages the entire customer’s credit lifecycle starting from acquisition to settlement.

Worldwide artificial intelligence (AI) software revenue is forecast to total $62.5 billion in 2022, an increase of 21.3% from 2021, according to a new forecast from Gartner, Inc.

As per the recent studies by Forbes industry forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the progress of AI:

• 63% of executives whose companies have adopted AI report that it resulted in increased revenues in the business areas where it is used
• 44% of executives say AI has reduced costs
• 76% of executives report they struggle with how to scale AI

In essence, there are ample opportunities to put AI at work and solve legacy problems. CSPs should start the AI journey as soon as possible. Delaying and waiting for technology to mature is not a good idea. Org-wide AI adoption needs ample time as it needs contextualizing. Generic implementations will not produce desired results. AI adoption requires a clear long-term strategy that goes through multiple phases. These phases include defining business drivers, identifying, re-imagining, and re-engineering the existing processes, selecting the right technology, integrating with the ecosystem, employee training, and building closed-loop feedback with continuous learning systems. Those organizations which started early have a distinct advantage over the competition. They are now in the phase of building AI assets libraries, AI Governance, and Ethical AI.