The telecoms industry is embracing artificial intelligence (AI) at pace, both to generate new revenues and to increase efficiency. To grow enterprise revenues, communication service providers (CSPs) have increasingly started to focus on non-core services like cloud, digital transformation, IT services and security. Meanwhile, from an internal perspective, AI is becoming crucial to solve the challenge of growing complexity of networks, improve network performance, and make networks more reliable. Beyond networks, AI is also finding a role for enhancing customer experience, fraud detection and improving overall operational efficiency.
In this report, Jim Morrish, the founding partner, and Suruchi Dhingra, the research director, at Transforma Insights, explore how CSPs are adopting AI both to enhance revenues and to enhance their own efficiency.
CSPs’ enterprise AI offerings fall into four broad categories, each of which we discuss below. These include AI infrastructure, AI professional services, AI integrated solutions and AI platforms.
AI infrastructure
There is an emerging trend towards CSPs building their own AI service infrastructure or offering computing as a service to enterprise clients, especially GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS). CSPs, including Ooredoo, Singtel and Maxis, are investing in partnerships to offer GPUaaS. But GPUs are an expensive investment to make and not many telecoms operators have prioritised investing in this area. It is mostly the large Asian network operators that are investing and ramping up initiatives for computing infrastructure and AI specialised data centres.
Jim Morrish 
Suruchi Dhingra 