Together we are stronger. This is what telecom operators seem to believe with the announcement of a future joint venture dedicated to the development of large language models (LLM) specifically for telecommunications companies. Deutsche Telekom (DT), e& Group, Singtel, SoftBank and SK Telecom held an inaugural meeting at MWC Barcelona 2024 this week and announced plans to establish a joint venture. For the occasion, the CEOs of the participating companies were present.
Asked about this, a spokesperson for Deutsche Telekom told us that this is the logical continuation of the announcement made last July, namely the project to create the Global AI Telco Alliance. If SoftBank is not part of this alliance, the objective is essentially the same as that announced this week at MWC, namely to accelerate the adoption of AI and create new use cases in telecoms.
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SoftBank enters into a strategic merger with other operators
The German firm, however, did not provide further details regarding the reasons which led SoftBank to approach other telcos. “The idea of the alliance has always been open to other operators and companies. That’s why SoftBank is now on board,” a DT spokesperson tells us. The Japanese conglomerate holds shares in T-Mobile US, the American subsidiary of DT, so this merger with other international operators seems logical.
Multilingual LLMs to come
The announcement made this week therefore aims to develop LLMs capable of helping “telcos” improve interactions with their customers through digital assistants and chatbots. They will also be multilingual and “optimized for languages such as Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese”, teaches us Deutsche Telekom. Subsequently, additional languages should be supported.
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Specific LLMs to push personalization to the extreme
“Already today, more than 100,000 customer service dialogs per month in Germany are processed by generative AI. By integrating large language models specific to telecommunications operators, our chatbot “Frag Magenta” becomes even more focused on humans: AI personalizes conversations between customers and chatbots”, said Claudia Nemat, board member for technology and innovation at Deutsche Telekom.
“This promises to be a game changer, not only for us at Singtel, but for any telecom company looking to improve their customers’ experience beyond limited automated responses and generic interactions with chatbots,” says Yuen Kuan Moon, CEO of the Singtel Group.
Reach a global market
And it’s also a way to reach a wider market: “our joint venture brings Europe and Asia closer together”, adds Claudia Nemat. The joint venture plans to focus on deploying AI applications tailored to the needs of Global AI Telco Alliance members in their respective markets. Stated objective: to reach a global customer base of around 1.3 billion subscribers in 50 countries.
To date, Deutsche Telekom has around 250 million subscribers in 12 countries, including Germany and the United States. The e& Group has 169 million subscribers across 16 countries across the Middle East, Asia and Africa, while the Singtel Group has 770 million subscribers across 21 countries, including Australia,India and Indonesia. The creation of the joint venture is planned for this year.
Model training has already started
The LLMs are currently being optimized. For this purpose, data from customer service chats was processed and pseudonymized, assures Deutsche Telekom. This data is used to refine the model for questions specific to telecom operators. This includes issues like pricing and contract models, information about special hardware such as router, for example, which are rarely found in the general training data of large models.
It is this content in particular that future digital telecommunications assistants must understand. They will need to be able to understand, summarize and respond to these specific concerns. “As telecom operators, we need to develop tailor-made LLMs for the telecom industry to make operators' operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit”commented Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT.
In parallel with this announcement, operators are also investing in start-ups behind conversational robots. This is the case of SK Telecom which, last August, injected 100 million dollars into Anthropic, designer of the AI-powered agent Claude.
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