AI: The next big thing for CSPs

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the next big thing for communications service providers (CSPs), but it's not clear yet exactly how they will use it or where it will have the biggest impact on their business. "Let's break it down a bit – it can be misleading," Telefónica Global Group's CIO, Phil Jordan, told attendees at the Executive Summit during TM Forum Live!. "We see clear use cases and value in cognitive and machine learning. Any decision we take in a systemic way, I have asked for a plan for when and where does that become a machine-learned activity? "It's the next transformation wave that is going to hit all of us – converting decision-making into something that isn't static rule-based," he adds. "I don't think that's a technology problem – it's here or it's coming." But is Telefónica making extensive use of AI today? "We made no use of it in the transformation," Jordan emphasized in discussing the company's massive digital transformation. "AI isn't a magic trick," he says, and it won't be useful unless operators transform their existing IT systems first. Indeed, that's the message we've been hearing from many of our members: AI is promising but it isn't reality – yet. In November we will publish an extensive Trend Analysis Report on AI and machine learning, analyzing the results of our surveys of CSPs and suppliers (choose the right one for you). Take the survey and you'll be entered into a draw for a $250 Amazon gift voucher. Certainly, new virtualized network functionality and new operational and business support systems are needed to take advantage of AI and machine learning (a form of AI), in customer facing applications such as virtual agents and chatbots and for end-to-end network and service management. "You have to teach it; you have to give the machine context all the time," Jordan explains. "You have to have a business that is ready and able to understand outcomes and go back and feed it into machine learning.