Formed last July, the GTAA will build multilingual LLMs that are expected to reach a market of approximately 1.3bn people across 50 countries.
A global AI alliance of telco companies plans to establish a joint venture that will develop large language models (LLMs) tailored to the needs of the telecoms industry.
At the inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI Alliance, or GTAA, held in Barcelona today (26 February) five major telecom companies – SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel and SoftBank – agreed to develop LLMs that will improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots.
“We as telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telco operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit,” said Ryu Young-Sang, CEO of SK Telecom.
“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.”
First formed last July and signed in Seol, South Korea, the GTAA initially consisted of only four members – with Japanese telecom provider SoftBank joining the alliance later. The idea was to jointly develop an AI platform for telcos to improve existing services such as assistants and apps.
Now, the joint venture due to be established this year will see the development of multilingual LLMs that can reach a market of approximately 1.3bn people across 50 countries. Initially, Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese will be supported.
Yuen Kuan Moon, group CEO at Singtel, said that the move promises to be a “gamechanger” for any telecom company looking to “lift their customer experience beyond limited automated responses” and generic chatbot interactions.
“This multilingual 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,” he said.
“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.”
The telecoms industry is one of many tech sectors that are bracing for change ushered in by the rise of AI. Last year, telecoms giant BT revealed plans to cut up to 42pc of its workforce – around 55,000 staff – by 2030 to become a “leaner business with a brighter future”, while increasing its use of emerging technology such as AI.
The company’s CEO told investors that he expects AI technology to replace around 10,000 BT jobs in the future.
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