Is your data architecture ready for AI? Take our survey

Communications service providers’ (CSPs’) rapidly increasing use of AI makes “democratization” of data critical as teams building AI use cases across the business need access to many sources of structured and unstructured data. Operators are realizing that unless they start the process of auditing, reviewing and in some cases overhauling their data architectures they will never truly exploit the potential of AI.

“There is an extremely close correlation between those CSPs which scored highest in data readiness in our GAMIT survey and AI maturity,” says Mark Newman, TM Forum’s Chief Analyst. “Put bluntly, CSPs cannot hope to deploy GenAI at scale unless or until they improve access to the data that sits across their organizations.”

TM Forum polled AI decision-makers within CSP organizations from June to August 2024 and fed the results into the Generative AI Maturity Interactive Tool, or GAMIT. Responses from 260 decision-makers globally were analyzed. The graphic below demonstrates that CSPs need much better access to unstructured data to take full advantage of AI applications: Only 5% rated their ability to use unstructured data as excellent.

What is a modern data architecture?

Building on GAMIT, TM Forum’s Research & Media team is conducting a new survey to explore CSPs’ approaches to data architecture. The results along with insights gleaned from interviews with telco data and AI leaders will be presented in a report to be published in March.

We’ll look at operators’ current approaches to data storage, optimization and orchestration, and the data governance programs they have in place. We will also identify best practices and the efforts underway to transition to a modern data architecture. And we’ll take a look at how TM Forum’s Modern Data Architecture Project is aiming to define the characteristics that make an architecture “modern” in the current telecoms landscape.

If you work for a CSP, please take the survey.