Generative AI is suddenly everywhere, all at once. What is driving the widespread adoption of AI? AI has proven essential to many companies' digital transformation strategies as it addresses critical challenges they face today.
No longer limited to providing basic phone and internet service, the telecom industry is at the epicenter of pushing the broad adoption of cutting-edge technologies, led by mobile and 5G broadband services in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. This growth is expected to continue due to the rapid adoption of AI in telecommunications to support networks and customers at scale. Valuates projects that the global AI In telecommunication market size will reach $14.99B by 2027, from $11.89B in 2020, at a CAGR of 42.6% during 2021-2027.
Solutions that enable network management, customer experiences, more intelligent scheduling, self-healing, and better coaching can reduce complexity, lower costs, and make customers and employees happier.
The Challenges that AI in Telecommunications Can Address in 2023
Poor Network Management
Global traffic and the need for more network equipment are growing dramatically, resulting in more complex and costly network management.
Lack of Data Analysis
Many companies struggle to leverage the vast amounts of data collected from their massive customer bases over the years. Data may be fragmented or stored across different systems, unstructured and uncategorized, or simply incomplete and not very useful.
High Costs
Following massive investments in infrastructure and digitalization, industry analysts expect global operating expenditures to increase by billions of dollars.
Crowded Marketplace
Customers demand higher quality services and better customer experience (CX) and are especially susceptible to churn when their needs are unmet.
Common Applications of AI in the Telecommunications Sector in 2023
The telecom industry is at the forefront of technological innovation, and artificial intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in this transformation. AI is used to improve network performance, automate customer service tasks, and develop new products and services.
One of the most important ways AI is used in the telecom industry is to improve network performance. AI can be used to analyze data from network sensors to identify potential problems before they occur. This allows telecom providers to take proactive steps to fix issues and prevent outages.
Here are some specific examples of how AI is being used in the telecom industry in 2023:
Network optimization
AI is being used to analyze data from network sensors to identify potential problems before they occur. This allows telecom providers to take proactive steps to fix problems and prevent outages. For example, companies use AI to predict network congestion and proactively reroute traffic to avoid outages. 5G networks began to roll out in 2019 and are predicted to have more than 1.7 billion subscribers worldwide – 20% of global connections — by 2025. AI is essential for helping build self-optimizing networks (SONs) to support this growth. These allow operators to automatically optimize network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone. In the telecom industry, AI uses advanced algorithms to look for patterns within the data, enabling telecoms to detect and predict network anomalies. As a result of using AI in telecom, companies can proactively fix problems before customers are negatively impacted.
Customer service automation and Virtual Assistants
AI-powered chatbots can answer customer questions and resolve issues without the need for human intervention. This can free up customer service representatives to focus on more complex issues. For example, Verizon uses AI to power its Virtual Assistant, which can answer customer questions about billing, service plans, and technical support.
Predictive Maintenance
AI-driven predictive analytics are helping provide better services by utilizing data, sophisticated algorithms, and machine learning techniques to predict future results based on historical data. This means operators can use data-driven insights to monitor the state of equipment and anticipate failure based on patterns. Implementing AI also allows technicians to proactively fix problems with communications hardware, power lines, and data center servers and even roll out updates. In the short term, network automation and intelligence will enable better root cause analysis and prediction of issues. In the long term, these technologies will underpin more strategic goals, such as creating new customer experiences and dealing efficiently with emerging business needs.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Many enterprises have vast numbers of customers engaged in millions of daily transactions, each susceptible to human error. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a business process automation technology based on AI. RPA can bring greater efficiency to operation functions by allowing companies to more efficiently manage their back-office operations and large volumes of repetitive and rules-based actions. RPA frees up staff for higher value-added work by streamlining the execution of complex, labor-intensive, and time-consuming processes, such as billing, data entry, workforce management, and order fulfillment. According to Statista, the RPA market is forecast to grow to 13 billion USD by 2030, with RPA achieving almost universal adoption within the next five years.
Fraud Prevention
Many companies are harnessing AI's powerful analytical capabilities to combat fraud. AI and machine learning algorithms can detect real-time anomalies, reducing fraudulent activities, such as unauthorized network access and fake profiles. The system can automatically block access to the fraudster as soon as suspicious activity is detected, minimizing the damage. With industry estimates indicating that 90% of operators are targeted by scammers on a daily basis – amounting to billions in losses every year – this AI application is especially timely for the market.
Revenue Growth & Analytics
AI can unify and make sense of a wide range of data, such as devices, networks, mobile applications, geolocation data, detailed customer profiles, service usage, and billing data. Companies can use AI-driven data analysis to increase their average revenue per user (ARPU) through smart upselling and cross-selling of their services. By anticipating customer needs using real-time context, companies can make the right offer at the right time over the right channel.
The Future of AI in Telecommunications
AI in the telecom market is increasingly helping manage, optimize, and maintain infrastructure and customer support operations. Network optimization, predictive maintenance, virtual assistants, RPA, fraud prevention, and new revenue streams are all examples of AI use cases where the technology has helped deliver added value for the enterprises they serve.
As big data tools and applications become more available and sophisticated, the future of AI will continue to develop.