Global Telco AI Alliance Formed by Industry Leaders to Revolutionize Customer Service with Tailored Language Models

Global Telco AI Alliance Formed by Industry Leaders to Revolutionize Customer Service with Tailored Language Models

(IN BRIEF) Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel, SoftBank Corp., and SK Telecom announce the establishment of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) during the Mobile World Congress 2024. Their joint venture aims to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) customized for telecommunications companies, enhancing customer interactions through digital assistants and chatbots. These telco-specific LLMs, optimized for multiple languages, will improve understanding of user intent and accelerate AI transformation in telco services. With plans to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries, the alliance focuses on deploying innovative AI applications tailored to member markets. Through targeted training and optimization of LLMs using pseudonymized customer service data, the alliance aims to revolutionize customer engagement, setting new standards for efficiency and innovation in the telecommunications landscape.

(PRESS RELEASE) BONN, 27-Feb-2024 — /EuropaWire/ — Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel, SoftBank Corp. and SK Telecom (NYSE:SKM, “SKT”) held the inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) at MWC Barcelona 2024 and announced their plans to establish a joint venture.

The meeting was attended by SK’s Chairman Chey Tae-won, SKT’s CEO Ryu Young-sang, Deutsche Telekom’s CEO Tim Höttges and DT’s Board Member for Technology & Innovation, Claudia Nemat, e& Group’s CEO Hatem Dowidar, Singtel Group’s CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, and SoftBank’s CISO Tadashi Iida.

Through the Joint Venture Company, the five companies plan to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies (telcos). The LLMs will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots.

The goal is to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for additional languages to be agreed among the founding members.

“We want our customers to experience the best possible service. AI helps us do that. Already today, more than 100,000 customer service dialogs a month in Germany are handled by Generative AI. By integrating telco-specific large language models, our ‘Frag Magenta’ chatbot becomes even more human-centric: AI personalizes conversations between customers and chatbots. And our joint venture brings Europe and Asia closer together,” says Claudia Nemat, Member of the Board of Management for Technology and Innovation at Deutsche Telekom.

Compared to general LLMs, telco-specific LLMs are more attuned to the telecommunications domain and better at understanding user intent. By making it easier for telcos to deploy high-quality generative AI models swiftly and efficiently, telco-specific LLMs are expected to help accelerate AI transformation of various telco business and services, including customer service.

The joint venture plans to focus on deploying innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the Global AI Telco Alliance members in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries. Deutsche Telekom boasts about 250 million subscribers across 12 countries, including Germany and the U.S. The e& Group has 169 million subscribers in 16 countries across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while the Singtel Group has 770 million subscribers in 21 countries, including Australia, India, and Indonesia.
It is planned to establish the Joint Venture Company within this year.

Training of the model has already started

The LLMs are currently being optimized. For this purpose, the data from chats of the customer service were processed and, of course, pseudonomized. This ensures data protection-compliant use. This data is used to fine-tune the model for telco-specific questions. This is because tariff and contract models, information on special hardware such as the router, for example (e.g. How do I do a reset?) are rarely found in the general training data of the large models. But it’s exactly this content that a telco bot needs to know. So that it is able to understand, summarize and respond to these specific concerns.

This targeted training ensures the LLM understands the unique language and needs of telecom operators, paving the way for enhanced, personalized, and efficient customer experiences.

Quotes from each company:

“We as telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telco operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit. Our ultimate goal is to discover new business models by redefining relationships with customers. The Global Telco AI Alliance brings synergy to its members by allowing them to achieve more by working as a team,” said Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT.

“This is a monumental step for e& and for the Telco industry at large. From streamlining customer support interactions to enabling personalised recommendations, this multi-lingual LLM will revolutionise how businesses engage with customers”, said Dena Almansoori, Group Chief AI and Data Officer, e& group. “In collaboration with our Global AI Telco Alliance partners, we look forward to shaping both the present and future of customer engagement and setting new standards for efficiency and innovation across the telecommunications landscape to better serve our customers and create meaningful impact.”

“This promises to be a game changer not just for us at Singtel but for any telecom company out there looking to lift their customer experience beyond limited automated responses and generic chatbot interactions. This multi-lingual LLM tailored for telcos will greatly expand chatbot capabilities with relevant responses to customers’ technical queries, freeing up service agents to deal with more complex customer issues and we intend to deploy this across the Singtel Group. With leading telcos from three different continents working on this innovative model, this unprecedented effort to scale AI development for the telecom industry would not have been possible had we all decided to go it alone.” Yuen Kuan Moon, Group Chief Executive Officer, Singtel.

“Through a powerful alliance with industry leaders, we embark on a mission to revolutionize global communication, elevate service quality, and ignite a new era of technological innovation powered by AI. Together, we have the power to shape the future of telecommunications, empowering communities worldwide with seamless connectivity and boundless opportunities,” said Hideyuki Tsukuda, Executive Vice President & CTO of SoftBank Corp.

Topic special MWC
For more information on the individual topics, visit www.telekom.com/mwc-special.

Stream Magenta Keynote
Stay tuned. Claudia Nemat will be reporting live from Barcelona with the “Magenta Keynote” on February 26, at 2:00 p.m.
You can follow the stream at www.telekom.com/media.

Visit us – in Barcelona or on the web
Experience our products and services live. From February 26 to February 29, 2024, you will find Deutsche Telekom in Hall 3 at Booth 3M31. We look forward to seeing you there.
All events will be streamed live.
Stage program and events: https://mwc.telekom.com

Verena Fulde, Spokesperson and Telekom Blogger

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SOURCE: Deutsche Telekom AG