AI presents a significant opportunity for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to transform their existing business models to drive greater efficiency and re-ignite growth in a challenging market. To support the global telco industry on this transformation, TM Forum has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch GAMIT, a Generative AI Maturity Interactive Tool.
Drawing on anonymised, aggregated data from in-depth surveys conducted with more than 200 AI decision-makers at CSPs worldwide, GAMIT enables CSPs to benchmark their generative AI (GenAI) maturity against regional peers and global leaders, identify priority use cases and rapidly move from development through to production at scale.
The AI opportunity for telcos is considerable. A recent report by McKinsey estimates that nearly $100 billion in incremental value, and up to $180 billion in productivity gains, can be realised through GenAI. However, initial findings from the data used to build GAMIT shows that the adoption of GenAI across the industry remains in its early stages, and many CSPs are struggling to move from bolt-on solutions to integrating AI as a built-in, native element across all operations.
Data from GAMIT reveals that only 25% of operators feel equipped to leverage advanced techniques like fine-tuning, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and prompt engineering for accurate results, with just 16% confident in using these methods to optimize costs and ROI. Leadership roles focused on AI are limited, with only a third of CSPs having a CXO dedicated to AI strategy. Furthermore, only 14% of operators have more than 10 GenAI use cases in production, and just 33% report having a robust GenAI pipeline. The most common barrier to advancing GenAI initiatives is the lack of accuracy in proof-of-concept stages
Underscoring the need for wider industry collaboration on, and understanding of, the challenges CSPs face from implementing GenAI at scale, these findings have informed the benchmarking model that underpins GAMIT, based around six pillars of GenAI maturity:
- Technology understanding and maturity: Evaluating and adapting foundation models to address industry specific use cases to deliver swift return on investment (ROI).
- Organization, responsibilities and skills: Embedding the necessary skills and roles across the organization to prioritize and execute AI deployments consistently at pace.
- Data readiness and availability: Ensuring fast and easy access to high-quality data from the telecom domain across the complete CSP organization to monetize data assets successfully and to enable fine-tuning models and model performance at inference.
- Governance, privacy, compliance and security: Integrating guardrails and policies to enable privacy and security while maintaining velocity.
- Business objectives: Enabling CSPs to quickly apply GenAI to high value workflows to realize a step-function in value.
- Taking AI use cases into production: Accelerating from proof of concept to live deployments with cloud native composable building blocks and design primitives.
“Generative AI offers an unprecedented opportunity for CSPs to drive revenue growth and operational efficiency, but concerns around technical expertise, demonstrable use cases, accuracy and real-world costs are hindering their ability to fully realize its benefits,” said George Glass, the chief technology officer of TM Forum. “GAMIT addresses these challenges by giving CSPs a clear benchmark of their GenAI maturity and a practical roadmap to scale it across their entire organisation. More importantly, the insights gained from GAMIT will inform the future direction of TM Forum’s collaborative initiatives, including our Catalyst projects and Innovation Hub, ensuring that Members have the data, resources and support they need to thrive in an AI-driven future.”
GAMIT was conceived and developed through close collaboration between TM Forum, its Members and AWS. The process began with extensive data collection, followed by a rigorous design and testing phase to ensure its accuracy and reliability. The result is a user-friendly, interactive tool that delivers clear value to the telco industry globally and exemplifies TM Forum’s mission to help CSPs and their suppliers to transform and thrive in the AI era.
“The pace of Generative AI innovation and experimentation in the telco sector has been impressive. In less than a year, we saw tangible use cases emerge that CSPs and telecom operators now seek to deploy at scale. Helping the industry to achieve their ambitions and create measurable outcomes by AWS working with TM Forum on supporting generative AI is a great opportunity for us,” said Ishwar Parulkar, the chief technologist of telecom at AWS. “It is part of our intensive collaboration with CSPs to accelerate their generative AI journey and maturity. We look forward to TM Forum launching the tool at Innovate Americas and to engage with industry leaders on the next steps for generative AI.”
CSPs ready to accelerate their AI journey can access GAMIT today at https://inform.tmforum.org/research-and-analysis/interactive-tools.
