SKT, Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel, and SoftBank to Establish a Joint Venture
Through the Joint Venture Company, the five companies plan to develop LLMs specifically tailored to the needs of telcos.
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SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel and SoftBank Corp. held the inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) at MWC Barcelona 2024 and announced their plans to establish a joint venture.
Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT, said, “We as telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telco operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit. Our ultimate goal is to discover new business models by redefining relationships with customers. The Global Telco AI Alliance brings synergy to its members by allowing them to achieve more by working as a team.”
Claudia Nemat, Board Member Deutsche Telekom for Technology and Innovation, said, “We want our customers to experience the best possible service. AI helps us do that. Already today, more than 100,000 customer service dialogues a month in Germany are handled by Generative AI. By integrating telco-specific large language models, our ‘Frag Magenta’ chatbot becomes even more human-centric: AI personalises conversations between customers and chatbots. And our joint venture brings Europe and Asia closer together.”
Dena Almansoori, Group Chief AI and Data Officer, e& group, said, “This is a monumental step for e& and for the Telco industry at large. From streamlining customer support interactions to enabling personalised recommendations, this multi-lingual LLM will revolutionise how businesses engage with customers. In collaboration with our Global AI Telco Alliance partners, we look forward to shaping both the present and future of customer engagement and setting new standards for efficiency and innovation across the telecommunications landscape to better serve our customers and create meaningful impact.”
Yuen Kuan Moon, Group Chief Executive Officer, Singtel, said, “This promises to be a game changer not just for us at Singtel but for any telecom company out there looking to lift their customer experience beyond limited automated responses and generic chatbot interactions. This multi-lingual LLM tailored for telcos will greatly expand chatbot capabilities with relevant responses to customers’ technical queries, freeing up service agents to deal with more complex customer issues and we intend to deploy this across the Singtel Group. With leading telcos from three different continents working on this innovative model, this unprecedented effort to scale AI development for the telecom industry would not have been possible had we all decided to go it alone.”
Hideyuki Tsukuda, Executive Vice President & CTO of SoftBank Corp, said, “Through a powerful alliance with industry leaders, we embark on a mission to revolutionise global communication, elevate service quality, and ignite a new era of technological innovation powered by AI. Together, we have the power to shape the future of telecommunications, empowering communities worldwide with seamless connectivity and boundless opportunities.”
Through the Joint Venture Company, the five companies plan to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies (telcos). The LLMs will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots.
The goal is to develop multilingual LLMs optimised for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for additional languages to be agreed among the founding members.
The joint venture plans to focus on deploying innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the Global AI Telco Alliance members in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries.
