Where Exactly Are We with AI and Telecom?

Nvidia released its third annual State of AI in Telecommunications survey, polling 450+ telecom employees to get a pulse on AI use in telecom.

From the looks of it, Nvidia’s poll shows a lot of optimism about AI in telecom, and some early wins.

Of the respondents, 60% said employee productivity was their biggest benefit from AI (Nvidia uses “coding and knowledge services” as examples. Compare that with the bottom two reported benefit (34%) “sales deal-flow automation and data summarization,” and “legal document review and
contract generation.”

84% said AI is helping to increase annual revenue, 77% said it’s helping reduce annual operating costs, 44% said are investing in AI to optimize customer experience optimization, which NVIDIA says is the biggest area of investment for telecom AI. 40% said AI is being deployed in network planning and operations.

AI as a service

84% of the respondents said they plan to offer generative AI services to customers.

“Providing generative software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions was the top use case at 52 percent. A little more than a third of survey respondents, 35 percent, said they’ll offer generative AI as a platform for developers, including compute services, while 34 percent said they’re planning on offering generative AI compute infrastructure,” the report said.

Will AI demand live up to the hype?

Looking outside telecom business use cases and into the greater sphere, what AI and other technologies will actually add to networks is a question still up for discussion. Even if it becomes incredibly popular, will it truly transform demands on networks?

Mobile networks

It has been predicted that generative AI would be adding a surge of mobile network traffic, for example, and that makes sense from logical standpoint. It's difficult to see how it couldn't, all things being equal. But some argue that at least in the short term, growth in mobile network bandwidth demand for AI may be slower than some in the industry are hoping for.

Marc Ganzi, CEO of digital Infrastructure investment form DigitalBridge made comments recently that while he expects mobile data consumption to rise significantly due to AI, he thinks it will happen slower than some predictions.

An article by 5G growth skeptic William Webb on the IEEE, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers website points out that even the most advanced technologies that are said to drive the future of mobile may not require more than what can be done on current 4G and 5G speeds, include smart city and IoT applications.

“To adjust to a potential new reality of operating their wireless networks at closer to utility-like or commodity-like terms, many telecom companies may face a future of restructuring and cost cutting. A useful analogy here are budget airlines, which thrive because most consumers select their airfare on the basis of cost,” writes Webb.

And of course some technologies do go through hype cycles that may not sync with what consumers are actually looking to use networks for. Who talks about the metaverse these days?

If these concerns are true, then what technology would drive the need for broad shifts in mobile network speed demands from a consumer standpoint?

Let me know your thoughts on mobile networks, AI, and other innovations and how you think it will play out in the coming years. Email me at [email protected].