The Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA), comprising e&, Singtel, SoftBank Corp, SK Telecom, and Deutsche Telkom, signed a joint venture agreement at TM Forum’s DTW24-Ignite. The JV marks the commitment to co-develop and launch multilingual telco large language models (Telco LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies.
The JV will see equal investments from founding parties to support its initial working capital needs to develop the LLMs. The Telco LLMs aim to help telcos improve customer interactions through digital assistants and other innovative AI solutions.
The JV will also look at deploying innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the founding parties in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries.Â
The Telco LLM will be multilingual, including Arabic, English, Korean, German, and Bahasa, among other languages. The launch of the JV is subject to customary regulatory approvals.
This significant step follows the GTAA’s announcement at MWC Barcelona 2024 to form a Joint Venture
Founding parties showcased potential applications of an LLM for telco, focusing on contact centre and infrastructure use cases. They demonstrated how a fine-tuned LLM could enhance contact centre operations by generating real-time reference answers for agents during calls and automatically handling post-call tasks. They also illustrated the model’s ability to answer infrastructure operators’ questions, streamlining their workflows.
The second Global Telco AI Roundtable (GTAR) was also held at DTW24. The GTAR highlighted the GTAA’s key progress and the AI governance systems and AI use cases reshaping the telecom landscape.
GTAR’s opening speech was delivered by SKT’s CEO Ryu Young-sang, who emphasized on the transformative potential of AI in the telecom industry. CEO Ryu highlighted that the Global Telco AI Alliance is well-positioned to be an active player in the global AI ecosystem as businesses worldwide are keen to reshape their business strategies through AI.
He added that new business opportunities would be created through the Telco LLM JV, and enhanced customer experience would be achieved. Ryu stressed that while heading towards this goal, the Alliance needs to proactively address the social and environmental responsibilities associated with AI by establishing an effective AI governance framework.
