Hackathon demonstrates business potential of TM Forum’s new GenAI tool, AIVA

One of the first tools developed by TM Forum’s Innovation Hub is AIVA, a GenAI-based conversational search virtual assistant, designed to make it much easier to source and use TM Forum assets. And AIVA’s use goes beyond helping members interact with TM Forum content, as a two-day Google Cloud Vertex AI Hackathon held at DTW24-Ignite demonstrated.

Using AIVA, which is currently available as a beta version, communications service providers (CSPs) taking part in the hackathon were able to combine their own enterprise data with TM Forum assets to solve business problems.

Four CSPs took part in the hackathon: Deutsche Telekom, Jio, Telefónica and Telenor. Each company’s team competed to create “the most ingenious solution to a significant business problem within their organization” using AIVA, which relies on Google’s Gemini large language model (LLM). AIVA was assisted in turn by a custom generative AI application developed by Google for the hackathon using Reasoning Engine.

“Google Cloud worked with the Innovation Hub team to make it possible for users to integrate the output from AIVA with their own data, documents and business systems,” according to Krishnamurthy Srinivasan, Head of AI/ML and Data Solutions for Telco Industry, Google Cloud. “The hackathon teams not only showed the value of this agent [in the form of] … better customer experience, autonomous operations and employee productivity, but also demonstrated its ease of use and flexibility by delivering super-impressive implementations within two days.”

Telenor takes the prize

The cross-functional Telenor team, made up of Andrey Mostovykh, Mads Holden, Weiqing Zhang, Eirik Hoel Høiseth and Liv Brekkenes, took home first prize in a close competition. Their winning solution set out to improve the customer experience of a roaming service for Telenor, which provides international communications, account security sales and engagement platforms.

“We considered multiple areas across the telco value chain including marketing and sales, network and IT operations, product development, and many more,” said Brekkenes, IT and AI Adoption Strategy director at Telenor. “Ultimately we focused on customer experience, with this being an important area of focus not only for Telenor but our industry as a whole.”

Telenor Linx, a global unit of Telenor, had been experimenting with the use of RCS/RBM (rich communications services/rich business messaging) for its digital sales platform and roaming products prior to the hackathon.

“These solutions can potentially be extended with Generative AI services embedded in various stages of the digital campaign workflow,” explained Andrey Mostovykh, Staff Engineer at Telenor. “As part of our hackathon solution we … concluded that the integration with Google Cloud generative AI products and services could allow for deeper adaptation to customer context, improved offer relevancy, increased end user trust in our customers’ offerings, and could have wide adoption possibility among mobile network operators.”

Over the two days, the team worked to improve the welcome message to customers’ roaming data pack offer. “These messages are typically delivered as SMS with a single offer and require the customer to find and enter a data pack code – a very static interface that is not always user-friendly,” explained Brekkenes.

“Our hackathon solution enabled dynamic communication with the customer – with text and imagery personalized according to the country of arrival, and an offer personalized on the basis of the customer’s data consumption history,” she added.

Google’s RCS/RMB capabilities delivered features with a single tap, and the LLM allowed the customer to respond with free-text questions that the model could answer automatically by drawing on the knowledge base used to train it, according to the Telenor team.

“We were able to take an idea we had already been developing in Telenor, and further augment that idea with the support of TM Forum and Google Cloud,” noted Brekkenes.

Real-world application

The team expects what it built during the hackathon to feed into a future solution.

“We are going to apply the learnings in our regular job, taking what we have achieved and validated through this hackathon to build a high-quality solution using our secure software development lifecycle to ensure security, stability, efficiency, performance and the highest level of user experience,” said Mostovykh.

“We are in the process of taking this to market and exploring a pilot with one of our Telenor operators and are excited for the opportunity for further scale the use case,” he explained.

Indeed, one of the strengths of Telenor’s hackathon team was its ability to draw on skills from across the company.

“Hackathons are brilliant at demonstrating the power of multidisciplinary teams,” according to Jen Hawes-Hewitt, Strategic Growth & Solution Development, Global Telecom Industry, Google Cloud, who was one of the five judges of the hackathon. “Often the winners, including in this case, are able to seamlessly combine business experts, who own the problem statement and can articulate the commercial value of the innovation, with human-centered designers able to reimagine the customer and/or employee experience.”

In addition to strong collaboration, the Telenor team displayed considerable commercial and technical acumen when addressing the specific use case of improving the experience of international roaming, noted Hawes-Hewitt.

It was “a clear pain point, that can be the root cause of bill shock, and often a missed opportunity for personalized CX and thoughtful upsell,” she explained. “By leveraging AIVA, in conjunction with Telenor's own protocols and standards … it was possible to demonstrate how Telenor could leverage the TM Forum knowledge base to implement an end to-end commercially attractive use case.”

Societal benefits

All four teams impressed organizers with the breadth of their thinking.

“We had challenged the hackathon participants to show how they could leverage TM Forum AIVA to solve real problems in their enterprises. While all the teams met this goal, some of them went beyond by discussing the values to the society as a whole from Gen AI and TM Forum assets,” said Srinivasan.

“One team showed the incredible value in providing TM Forum assets through easy conversational access in local languages and dialects to train non-English speakers – now telco support jobs open up for them, alleviating the unemployment problem in their communities,” he added. “Another team discussed the sustainability benefits by accelerating realization of autonomous networks. The passion of these teams to articulate specific societal benefits like these was truly inspiring.”

TM Forum plans to partner on organizing further enterprise hackathons as part of its recently launched Innovation Engine, which in addition to including the Innovation Hub to accelerate software delivery also houses Catalysts for rapid prototyping and Next20 to showcase critical startups.

“The Google Cloud Vertex AI Hackathon showcased industry innovation at its finest. Watching four teams leverage TM Forum AIVA and the power of Google’s Vertex AI platform to develop groundbreaking business solutions in just two days highlights our industry's immense potential,” said Aaron Boasman-Patel, Vice President, AI, Labs & Innovation, Product & Portfolio Management. “Collaboration is a powerful force, and that's why we created the Innovation Engine – to unite the industry, foster innovation, tackle major challenges, and drive growth with new solutions.”.