How Globe Telecom is fostering AI skills and innovation

When Anton Reynaldo Bonifacio became Globe Group’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) at the beginning of this year he retained his existing role of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

This raised some eyebrows within Globe, according to Bonifacio, speaking at TM Forum’s Innovate Asia event. “I think people got scared. They were like, ‘Oh, no, how are we supposed to innovate [with AI] when it's the security guard that's supposed to drive it?”

But as both CISO and CAIO of Globe Telecom, Bonifacio sees AI as a means to enable employee innovation and as way to to break down internal silos. For this reason, he wants to ensure that AI and data guardrails do not cramp how employees use AI to solve problems and increase productivity.

“We have a highly democratized approach. We don't want to do [AI] … top down and say [these are] the few spaces that will make you more productive," he explained.

This is particularly true when it comes to internal use cases. Here Globe is taking a ‘bottom-up’ approach and encouraging employees to deploy AI and to “build their own GPTs” to improve productivity. “We want to be able to equip our teams and employees with the right tools so that they can solve their own problems … in an environment where it's safe to innovate,” said Bonifacio.

Indeed, Bonifacio warns against spending on external AI tools and third-party consultancy if it comes at the expense of developing employees’ skills.

“Imagine if, 30 years ago, the way we approached Excel adoption was to work with all these different vendors or consultants [who] … charge[d] you a million dollars for a spreadsheet. It's kind of nuts. But that's sort of what's happening: ‘If you pay me $750,000, I'll make your chat bot’ … when what you actually want is people in your teams [doing the equivalent of] learning how to use Excel and create their own spreadsheets.”

At the same time, he recognized the need for externally sourced AI solutions.

“Whether … in the security space or the network space, there are some [complex] use cases where it makes sense that AI is built into those platforms.”

The trick is striking the right balance: “I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but at the same time, I don't want to rely heavily on a lot of built-in things, or something that a vendor or partner will have to customize for me, because there are some use cases I can do myself.”

The data conundrum

Like many telcos the world over Globe Telecom is examining how to balance the appetite for AI innovation with the need for high quality data. Bonifacio advised against getting “into that trap of ‘we need a super advanced data lake before we can democratize’” data.

He admitted he does not have all the answers. However, for now, he believes “there’re a lot of basic things with low code, no code, that you can get immediate value from,” without having squared off every aspect of data policy.

Generative AI usage policies, for example, in certain instances can take the form of PDF documents added to a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) platform, said Bonifacio. (RAG is a technique for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models by drawing facts from sources, according to Nvidia.)

“There're actually already a lot of wins, even within the network teams,” he said, adding that “if you put all of your technical manuals, RAG it … your field service folks will be able to do a lot more immediately.”

However, when it comes to externally facing use cases, the company is taking a more top-down approach to developing AI solutions direction, mapping where it can add value to customers.

End-to-end solutions

The AI team is also showing how a cross-organizational team structure can help the company take a more end-to-end approach to problem solving.

Bonafacio has structured his AI team so that all his direct reports are also leaders within other parts of the organization. For example, the head of AI Governance sits within the data privacy team.

“When I was tasked to build this AI I didn't want to create a silo organization [and] the organization that we built is a highly matrix organization,” explained Bonifacio.

As a result, “we're not network heavy, we're not necessarily IT heavy or CS heavy … it’s everybody … working under one umbrella as a team, and we're able to solve problems a bit … more holistically. And honestly, it's breaking down a lot of silos,” according to Bonifacio.