Carriers Betting Big on AI Without Yet Seeing Returns on Investments
Wireless carriers across the world are making huge investments in their networks, and in AI, but have yet to see the return on investment they’re seeking, executives said Tuesday during an RCR Wireless telco AI forum. Colin Bannon, chief technology officer at BT, confirmed carriers' big AI bets, though he acknowledged many questions remain.
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“We have this gold rush of investment in the large data centers and training models, and we see that proliferating” with hundreds of billions of dollars invested, Bannon said. The market is “maturing very rapidly, however the return on investment” is “still evolving.”
What the big players are “betting on” is that AI is “still scaling,” Bannon said. AI training models “are leapfrogging each other and in two years' time we’re going to have stuff that we never even dreamed about in terms of the power of AI.” In a gold rush “you also have the circumstance where it’s about like the Wild West.”
Bannon said the telecom industry hasn’t put enough focus yet on what AI traffic demands will mean for networks. “This is a whole new field of thought,” he said. If you spend $1 billion on AI training and “you waste a third of that time because of latency in the network, you’re not getting a really great return on your investment.” AI will power networks, but they also must be “AI ready.”
Carriers must navigate when they will invest and how to maximize returns “in a world where Moore’s Law is being broken and beaten down on a regular basis,” Bannon said. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.
AI has “entered the boardrooms” of telecom companies faster than any technology shift we have seen, said Jen Hawes-Hewitt, head-strategic programs and solutions, global telco industry, at Google Cloud. About two-thirds of telecom executives are focused on using AI in their networks, she said.
“This is no longer something that’s kind of far off in the future” or “just in experimentation,” Hawes-Hewitt said. “We’re actually seeing real, concrete, live, in-production use cases.” One big early use case is energy conservation, employing AI and machine learning (ML) in combination with 5G.
It appears that the telecom industry is moving faster on AI and generative AI than most other industries, Hawes-Hewitt said. CEOs are asking chief technology officers how they can implement AI, she added.
The telecom industry is finishing the first stage of 5G and 5G-advanced is on the “horizon,” said Jitin Bhandari, Nokia chief technology officer-cloud and network services. “We have rolled out a new set of radios, new set of transport capabilities” but are still in the early stages of moving to 5G stand-alone (SA) networks, he said. In 2025, “we believe there are going to be a huge amount of rollouts of 5G SA.”
5G SA means automation and autonomous decision-making, Bhandari said. “If you want to get to autonomous decision-making, AI becomes a very effective tool.” The adoption of ML and traditional AI and generative AI is already starting deployment, he said.
Telenor Norway is assessing how AI can improve customer experiences on its network, said Age Ingierd, head-data and AI platform at the provider. The carrier is starting to see more AI use, working with technology partners like Google, he said.
“It’s going to be a very rich ecosystem that will lead the operators to get to where they want to get to,” Ingierd said. Today it takes as long as nine months to plan and deploy a network, he said. “That has to change” and AI will play a big role.
Joe Krystofik, head-AI software product planning, network automation at Fujitsu Network Communications, said carriers can understand network data much more quickly using gen-AI. “Historically, you’d have to sift through this data and spend a lot of time going through it,” he said. It’s “a real key tool to understanding the network better, deriving meaning from the network.”