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The future of telecom analytics is AI-driven

CSPs have started to integrate AI to adapt to the changing market, competition, customer demands and expectations. Telecom executives need to understand that this shift is taking place and the huge extent of it.

Eynav (Navi) Azaria
09 May 2019

The future of telecom analytics is AI-driven

At Digital Transformation World next month, Eynav Azarya, CEO - Panorama will share advanced AI and analytics use cases which are transforming telco operations. Join him and 3000+ of your telecoms industry peers from across the world for three immersive days of inspiration, innovation and networking.

The telecommunications industry is at the beginning of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift and soon there will be no looking back. As we’ve seen before with other technological advances and other industries, the only recipe for success is to embrace it and flow with it. Telecoms that look the other way and deny it, will be left behind (think Kodak and Blockbuster, may they rest in peace).

Welcome to the future – my future and yours.

People always ask me: how do you see yourself in five years? A question that gives me the excuse to share a vision of the future of AI-driven telecom:

I’m a sports fan and based on my viewing habits, my telecom provider knows that. I also happen to own a smart watch, a connected car, and a smart phone. The Super Bowl is in 30 minutes and I’m not at home. So a message pops up on my watch and phone “The Super Bowl is starting soon, do you want me to direct you to the closest restaurants/bars that are playing it live?” and I reply “No, I’m heading home to watch it”. By the time I get home, my provider notifies me that they know I will probably watch the game with the highest quality possible and to make sure there are no interruptions. So they offer me a great package that I can accept with a simple click.

This scenario is likely not even five years away. Most of the necessary technologies already exist and are being used by consumers. 5G and AI will allow telecoms to enable user stories that run across all channels and all aspects of life. Telcos will use AI to shift from “knowing what happened and dealing with it” to “predicting and being proactive”, empowering telcos to lower costs, make better decisions, increase customer lifetime value and enhance customer experience to push out churn.

CSPs have started to integrate AI to adapt to the changing market, competition, customer demands and expectations. Telecom executives need to understand that this shift is taking place and the huge extent of it – AI will reshape the way telecos evolve their business, the way networks operate, the way they engage with customers, how they find new opportunities, how they bill and charge their customers, and how they predict the future.

AI-related hot trends

Many AI-related technologies are already being used by consumers, homes, cars, and businesses. We can easily group them under the main trends disrupting the telecom industry.

The smart world revolution: The biggest technological revolution of the 21st Century

The number of connected devices is growing at an unprecedented rate. We see a growing use of devices such as connected cars, smart TVs, smart phones, fitness trackers, home assistants, home security systems, smart meters, manufacturing sensors and more. It is currently estimated that we’re generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day! This data can be a gold mine for the telcos, but they are not yet prepared to deal with it. That’s where AI comes in. Applying AI technologies to data analytics will allow CSPs to get insights from the data and monetize it. And as the owners of the network, 5G technology, communication and subscriber data, CSPs will enable the IoT revolution. This will lead to the next evolution of telecom: B2B2X. Telecoms will partner with other businesses and governments to implement IoT in other industries and the ‘smart life’ will be a new reality.

AI analytics for next-best-offer and churn prediction

One of telecom’s biggest challenges is to drive churn down and to maintain market differentiation. The key to achieve this is to improve customer experience. Using AI analytics, CSPs can pinpoint their next best offer and launch a micro-segmented and personalized campaign to a customer at the right time, based on their own preferences and history. For churn prediction to work, providers must analyze data from many different sources and only AI can make sense of that amount of data. Thes type of data analyzed include usage patterns, billing information, purchase history, device preferences, demographic data, location, customer journey, customer interactions, quality of service, network performance, product logs, SLAs, etc. AI analytics platforms emulate the tasks of expert data scientists to automate the entire predictive process. CSPs can predict what will happen and how likely it is to happen, they can understand the variables affecting the outcomes, and they can investigate which actions will impact their KPIs and how.

5G and smart networks

5G is the next generation of network, and will enable telecoms to apply AI to networks, making them smart, optimizing CapEx. This will improve overall network performance, optimize service levels, minimize overhead costs and maximize profitability. Using AI and analytics, telecoms can analyze coverage data like percentage of land covered with services, percentage of population covered with services, average land unavailable to services, and more. AI-powered smart networks allow for network traffic analysis in real time to identify the periods when the network usage is high, and take steps to relieve the congestion, preventing potential outages (which lead to customer dissatisfaction and churn). They can also detect areas with excess network capacity, helping telcos to launch specific marketing campaigns to increase uptake in those areas. Using AI for smart network capacity optimization can save millions of dollars every year.

Robots automating tasks

When AI comes up, the most obvious use case pops into people’s minds: robots. AI powers the ‘minds’ of machines, allowing them to replicate certain aspects of the human mind. We are already at the level that telcos can use robots to automate back office tasks and deal with the huge amount of repetitive processes that can be rule-based. This is easy for robots. AI is used also in call centers, optimizing the costs of dealing with the first couple of customer interactions. Most support issues can be solved during those first touches by a bot simply providing the right information. This saves telecoms millions of dollars and saves the time of the human representatives for the tough cases that require human interaction. But please, let’s stop thinking that AI equals robots in call centers, because as I mentioned earlier, it has so much more potential!

AI is an imminent reality, so how to prepare for the future?

AI is taking the telecom industry by storm and providers need to be prepared to ride on top of the wave and not wallow under it. Here are a few recommendations.

  1. Familiarize yourself and your enterprise on AI-related technologies and the current market trends.

  2. Do not expect your IT team to address the AI-driven trends. The first effort needs to come from board members, general management, and customer-experience or digital transformation officers.

  3. Create and implement a strategic plan that positions AI into your tech strategy and the core of your business processes. Remember, getting your people on board and updating your enterprise culture is a key step in the plan.

  4. Start creating business partnerships with companies that can help you drive your AI strategic plan into reality.

  5. Create and implement a data plan, it will be your most valuable asset and the ‘fuel’ to power your AI strategy. Make sure you have the right data analytics tools in place and that they can run connected and smoothly across your whole enterprise without losing data in silos.

  6. Design an agile technology infrastructure for your company. You will need agile and productized tools and a team of visionaries ready to rock-and-roll.