The companies said they aim to launch a joint venture company as part of this global telco AI alliance
MWC, Barcelona— Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel, SoftBank and SK Telecom officially launched the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) at MWC Barcelona 2024.
During the launch event, the telcos also announced plans to establish a joint venture, through which the companies plan to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies. The LLMs will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots.
The partners also noted that the main goal of the JV is to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for additional languages to be agreed among the founding members.
Compared to general LLMs, telco-specific LLMs are more specific to the telecommunications domain and better at understanding user intent, the partners said.
The JV also announced 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.
The partners also said that the establishment of the JV company is expected to be completed within this year, adding that they have already started work to train the model. This targeted training ensures the LLM understands the unique language and needs of telecom operators.
“We want our customers to experience the best possible service. AI helps us do that. Already today, more than 100,000 customer service dialogs 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 personalizes conversations between customers and chatbots. And our joint venture brings Europe and Asia closer together,” said Claudia Nemat, member of the board of management for technology and innovation at Deutsche Telekom.
Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom, said that telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telecommunications operations more efficient, adding that the ultimate goal is to discover new business models by redefining relationships with customers.
Last year, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom had announced plans to jointly develop an industry-specific language model. The two telcos said that the new offering will be specially tailored to the requirements of digital assistants in customer service and will make easier for telecommunications companies to deploy generative AI models efficiently and quickly.
SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom had also announced plans to collaborate with AI companies such as Anthropic and Meta to co-develop a multilingual large language model tailored to the needs of telcos, with plans to unveil the first version of the telco-specific LLM in the first quarter of 2024.