CXO Forum 2024 Sponsor Series: In conversation with Mr Ravi Kailat, Dell Technologies

Generative AI has emerged as a technological powerhouse capable of reshaping industry across the board. The telecom sector is no exception, with the potential for GenAI to revolutionise operations, customer service and innovations. Ravi Kailat, APJ Regional Partner Manager of Dell Technologies, a platinum sponsor for the Bridge Alliance CXO Forum 2024,  shared with Ken Wee, our SVP Partnership & New Business about what Dell is doing to help operators cope with AI challenges.

 

Ken: How should telcos be preparing themselves for GenAI?

Ravi: So generative AI or GenAI as we know it, has the potential to have a generational impact not just to telcos but to many industries as you rightly mentioned.

So the first thing that the telcos has to do is to what does generative AI really mean to me? When I say that it means a very conscious decision about what I should do in generative AI, but also what I should not do, at least initially in generative AI. What that leads to is a very much a board level driven plan, a board level driven view or a holistic view of the business, and where generative AI can be implemented. A very structured approach.

I would say that they would potentially also look at appointing potentially an AI lead. Who has that lead to look across the entire operations of the telco to figure out what is the right plan for the telco. Now, if we don’t have a structured plan and we go a top down approach that could implement something with GenAI, it’s like handing over a shiny new toy with no instruction manual. Chat chatbot is just the beginning. There are many areas where generative AI can have an impact. But critically, when we talk about a chat chatbot, the implementation maybe it sounds very straightforward, but what’s important is where is my data? What is the quality of data? How am I presenting this data? What LLMs am I running on this data? How is this data being exposed to the end users? So this requires a lot of planning.

And I would say that telcos should invest time in working with partners like Dell Technologies to understand the technology, the architecture, the TCO and the benefits that come out of it as part of creating their own plan. The telcos’ operations by nature is large, widespread and complex. OpEx management continues to be a huge area of focus, and this is where there is a lot of value to unlock for the telcos. This comes in trying to improve your customer experience, trying to improve in how the data is provided to the technicians who are operating the network.

So this sort of data availability is a very important use case when we talk about chat chatbot as an application. The question is what insights are we providing? And do those insights help to get translated into real operational benefits in terms of either an end-user experience or also in providing the right information to your knowledge worker to make the required changes on the network.

But let’s look at the network. In the end, that is the critical asset, the critical asset that a telco has. The network generates a huge amount of data at all times. Using generative AI, algorithms or LLMs, if you are able to provide to use this data to provide the right insight to the operations team or even make adaptations automatically in real-time or almost real-time basis, then we are able to ensure that the network reliability is consistently delivered.

But that’s the network. What about what can we do on the network? And this is where we are seeing some telcos investing in GPU-as-a-Service, as an offering. This is a great example of where the telco leverages the most critical assets: their connectivity, the connectivity fabric, the data centers, and the proximity to the users to be able to deliver a valuable GPU time as a service to companies that will need it, or even consumers who will need it.

So these are some of the use cases that we are seeing both internally and externally, that we are seeing coming up in the generative AI space.

 

Ken: How can a telco service be impacted by the potential in GenAI?

Ravi: So it has been said that, a telco service is best delivered when a user doesn’t know about them. I think it’s unfair. We only seem to remember our telcos when we have a service interruption or a degraded service. Very rarely do we say there’s something going on with the phone, do we? We should probably look at changing the question and looking at it from the point of view that how can we use generative AI to be more proactive in delivering a reliable service to the consumers and enterprises while not being invasive?

You know, by not being having our presence very well known as such. So let’s start at the network and let’s go straight into the heart of the network. When we go to the heart of the network. We talk about the billing systems. This is where telcos have the most amount of data about for a consumer or an enterprise. What is the consumer using? Where is it using? How much are they using? And these sort of usage trends are critical data on which we can enact these algorithms to provide insights that can then deliver new customer packages, for example. Now, I understand that there is going to be a lot of effort in terms of changing packages, processes and so on, and this is going to be well worth its investment when we see the customer delight that comes out of it.

Let’s take the case of why would the same roaming package be offered to me and my partner when it’s only relevant to me? Or why would a streaming package be offered to me, where it is probably more useful to somebody else? All this data is available with the telco. If we are able to use generative AI to to use this data quickly, react quickly and provide insights and packages to the customer, it enhances customer delight. So that’s one example where we see that the telcos can leverage generative AI as a use case. So of course next is the network itself. As we had mentioned, the network generates a lot of data. If you are able to use generative AI, telco specific LLMs and be able to use that data to provide insights to the technicians, but also make changes on the fly, then we can be prepared for any sort of service requirements or potential service interruptions, and always have the network available and reliable and avoid in case of any calamity that comes up. In the end, having that network always available and always reliable is a critical aspect of a telco service offering.

 

Ken: So, sounds like the execution is key and there will be challenges in adopting AI for telcos. How can telcos overcome risk in adopting generative AI?

Ravi: There is no one size fits all. There’s no one solution that fits for everybody. So it’s a bit of a journey over here. I would say that there are two parts to it.

The first part is having that board level plan, having a holistic plan about what really the generative AI means to you as a telco, and what are the use cases that we want to implement, and what are the offerings we want to take into the market? The second aspect is, how do we get to that TCO, right? Look, I get it. TCO, ROI, these are super important. But the question also, how do we get to that ROI? You know, if we look at some use cases that are emerging, we are seeing telcos offering GPU-as-a-Service. That’s a very clear, targeted outcome with a very clear ROI that the telcos are going after.

But what about its own internal use cases? And this is something that we are seeing now. Some more and more telcos starting to work with Dell Technologies partners like Dell Technologies on to create platforms where they can start implementing use cases and then scale them out as more and more use cases emerge. If I go back, I would say that, having that structured approach, that board level plan, having that, AI lead in place, make sure that we are not taking an ad hoc approach where we keep running into risk and try to mitigate it, versus having a plan where we know what are the things we are trying to achieve. We know what risk we are taking and we know how to mitigate it.

 

Ken: That was Ravi Kailat from Dell Technologies. Thank you for watching ‘be’ in conversation.