This distinguished panel from Omdia, ICE, MTN and Telekom Srbija had varying views about the big opportunities for AI and APIs, and the road to monetisation through an ecosystem
The panel at Mobile Europe’s virtual Telco to techco event was moderated by Adam Mackenzie (pictured top right), Senior Analyst – Service Provider Networks at Omdia. Our expert panel comprised Tor Björn Minde (bottom right), Director – Head of ICE Data Center Unit, RI.SE, Predhayen Govender (bottom left), Senior Manager Information Security, at MTN and Djordje S. Radovic (top left), Core Network and Services Director at Telekom Srbija.
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Opportunities for AI
First they debated the biggest growth opportunities for telcos looking at AI and APIs separately, then in combination.
For example, Radovic said that he does not view GenAI and AI as evolutionary so much as revolutionary and believes “It will change everything” and ultimately enable “some kind of monetisation of everything that we can come across in the future”. In the immediate future, he thinks the biggest opportunity is AI-enabled hyper personalisation and security using AI-based anomaly detection to identify threats and fraudulent activity in real time.
He added, “When you combine AI with APIs, I think the sky is the limit if we are talking about some…specific offer to the to the existing customer base, and maybe to a new customer base as well”, including a non-human one like IoT.
Original thinking?
Later, when discussing the maturity of the ecosystem and telcos’ place in it, Minde suggested getting third parties including developers onboard by offering APIs in some sort of bundle, “but not think about monetising. First let them innovate”.
This intrigued moderator Mackenzie who stated, “I find that interesting because I feel like you often hear almost the opposite side – that telco sometimes has a problem with creating technology [for its own sake] without necessarily solving a business need…This is almost looking at from the opposite angle” and this lively discussion continued.
Govender believes strategic partnerships could be important to expand operators’ market reach and service offerings – in other words, providing customers with more comprehensive solutions. In future he sees bit opportunities in IoT, with telcos leveraging cloud and 5G, even out to smart home automation, combining mobile broadband and IoT services. These principles could also be applied to healthcare using an API to securely transmit data from a patient’s wearable to healthcare providers in real time.
“We want to ensure that we derive the most value from our networks, data and infrastructure, and that that’s where the opportunity lies,” he said.
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