Like many sectors, the telecommunications industry faces a tough economic landscape. Back in 2022, Bain Capital predicted that telcos would struggle with increased personnel and escalating operating costs due to inflation. We’re seeing that occur now, meaning, telcos must proactively seek opportunities to optimise revenue streams and streamline operations.
Data plays a pivotal role in powering cost control strategies, with automation and digital transformation initiatives helping to drive long-term cost reductions but also increase efficiency. A recent Boston Consulting Group report found that leading telecoms companies are “radically optimising costs through next-generation network architecture and core-to-cloud transformation” as well as “exploring ways to deploy generative AI that will transform each step in the industry’s value chain.”
For telcos to not only survive, but thrive, in an increasingly competitive market, they’ll need to make strategic use of the cloud and AI to enhance efficiency and scalability in a cost-effective way.
Reduce cloud costs by running large regular data workloads on private cloud.
Public cloud is flexible, agile and accessible, making it a great option for innovative businesses with varying project workloads. However, most telcos experience “sticker shock” when public cloud operations go into full production and look to FinOps to counter this. But careful workload management, combined with data observability, can help with cost reduction by offering more efficient alternatives, such as moving more mature workloads to private cloud. But telcos need to have visibility of their data and workloads first.
Hybrid cloud data architecture for managing workloads
Due to regulatory and security policies, some workloads or sets of data cannot be stored on public cloud infrastructure. Similarly, these workloads can vary greatly in terms of resource requirements when they’re initially deployed, making it cheaper to run them in the cloud. Telcos need to have the flexibility to move between public and private clouds to ensure they are compliant with evolving regulations and company policy. To be successful, they must have the ability to move workloads at will, enabling them to ensure the best option is always available.
Deploying generative AI to identify and resolve network anomalies
Telco networks are very complex – often multi-vendor, integrating telecom and IT standards with wireless, wired and legacy models. Such complex structures make finding network defects a time-consuming and challenging task. Institutional knowledge of the network compounds this, as it often sits with just a small group of individuals. Generative AI can help to discover network issues as they arise and translate them into natural language. It can also suggest causes and resolutions based on historical performance, vendor communities and other documentation.
Using data and generative AI to build customer profiles for personalised support
Traditionally, customer profiles were based purely on data like billing information, payment history and customer service interactions. However, networks can draw upon layers of valuable passive experience data from customers, building nuance into each customer interaction. Telcos can utilise generative AI to gather new sources of data, such as instantly translating voice interactions and suggesting recommendations, as well as providing sentiment analysis and CSR guidance in real time.
However, these innovations all rely on data. Telcos have an abundance of it at their disposal and being able to harness data’s power will be key to cutting costs. Whether it’s enabling AI by giving it access to a complete set of quality data, or making data-driven decisions over workloads, telcos need to deploy a modern data architecture which will allow them to drive insight from their data, no matter where it resides.
Data as a competitive edge
Generative AI offers huge potential, as does workload analytics. But the impact of these tools depends on data. With the industry looking to ride out this period of economic uncertainty, only the telcos that can capitalise on the potential of data to drive innovation will truly flourish in the long term.
Anthony leads the communication, media, and entertainment industry business for Cloudera, a global leader in hybrid data cloud solutions. He is responsible for developing and executing the industry strategy, driving thought leadership, leading sales, and a globally matrixed team across marketing, product management, and sales enablement. He is also an IBM Industry Academy alumnus.