Our panellists have about 1 billion customers collectively – as our moderator, Appledore’s Robert Curran puts it, “a lot of skin in the game”
The panel on how AI will shape tomorrow’s telecoms networks opened Mobile Europe‘s recent virtual conference, AI in infrastructure (you can playback all the videos this and other conferences from here). It was moderated by Robert Curran (bottom right in pic above), Consulting Analyst at Appledore Research. Our panellists were Yue Wang, Chief Technologist – Network and AI, China Telecom (top left), Olivier Simon, VP Smart Networks and Data, Orange (bottom left) and Inanç Çakiroğlu, Group CIO, VEON, top right).
They began by Curran asking Yue to outline how she sees AI shaping the network and network operations, which Olivier of Orange followed up by saying how data is become a much more central question for telcos than it was a few years ago – despite the fact we’ve been talking about taming data for more than a decade. Curran asked how data considerations are changing Orange’s network or IT strategy?
Watch the video playback now here.
Çakiroğlu talked about whether the impact of AI is in the business and customer-facing areas more than in network infrastructure at the moment, and how that is likely to change.
They went on to discuss the important distinction between training and inference, and if this require separate strategies for how IT and network are designed. This led to Çakiroğlu talking about specific results VEON is seeing from the operational deployment of AI, then Orange’s recommendations for other operators to progress using AI in their networks and network operations.
Yue and Çakiroğlu talked about how their reliance on in-house skills versus working in collaboration with vendors and what the need from the vendor community. Simon concludes the session with an explanation of how Orange measures the cost of its AI investment and justification of investment.
Watch the video playback now here.
