AI and machine learning increasingly integral to business assurance

If I were to speak about “business assurance” to a room of executives five years ago, I would have had a room full of people understanding the concept in different ways.

Much has happened since. Over time, the initial concept has transformed into a well-defined framework and been incorporated into TM Forum’s eTOM business process framework. Subsequently, the Business Assurance Dimension Framework was published, and parts of the Revenue Assurance Guidebook were updated.

Today, we can see the huge impact of the initiative, with a recent TM Forum Business assurance survey finding that 51% of respondents were using TM Forum’s business assurance best practices, while 40% had already established a business assurance function.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are two technologies that have become an integral part of business assurance. Again, the TM Forum Business assurance survey figures speak for themselves: 46% of respondents have already incorporated these technologies, as opposed to only 10% in the 2019 survey. Moreover, a further 32% are considering doing so during 2022.

The results too, are impressive. 65% reported satisfactory results in all the business assurance domains where machine learning was applied, with an additional 26% saying the same about some (but not all) of their domains. For practical guidance, I highly recommend TM Forum Business Assurance AI Machine Learning Use Case Guide.

Meanwhile, revenue leakage –both detected and estimated – according to the same survey, increased by almost 50% from 2019 to 2021, which is alarming. While the jury is still out on the precise reason, my personal opinion (which is by no means the only one) is that it’s the result of a perfect storm between the mass 5G rollout and the COVID-19 pandemic, which drastically accelerated the pace of digitalization and self-service usage, resulting in organizations needing to make massive and rapid changes to their processes, business models and systems.

Looking to the future, the pace of change will continue unabated, increasing the risk of leakage. Yet it will also take precious time for organizations using traditional revenue assurance methodologies and technologies to learn the nature of each new risk and put the necessary controls in place. I firmly believe that by adopting TM Forum’s best practices and combining them with AI and ML, we can significantly expedite the journey towards a place where our revenue assurance methodologies can truly withstand the test of time

The TM Forum Business assurance survey includes lots of important and interesting data and insights, I urge you to download and read the survey, and share your comments.