Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:23):
Hello and welcome to our preview of this year's AI Native Telco Summit, part of our ongoing DSP Leaders coverage. I'm Guy Daniels. Now, this is only the second year of the summit where we look at the use of network based AI by telcos, but already it has become one of our most popular. And as always, we bring you a mix of panel discussions, executive interviews, and insights from our vendor sponsors. These programs will be available to watch on demand from 7:00 AM UK time each morning of the summit. We then bring you our live q and a programs, one per day streaming live from 4:00 PM UK time. So watch the videos, send in your questions, then settle back for the live show. Well, let's take a detailed look at the agenda for the AI Native Telco summit and give you a little taste of what to expect.

(01:27):
Day one starts on Tuesday the 15th of October, and our first panel discussion of the summit looks at the benefits of becoming AI native. This means adopting new best practices, fostering collaboration with partners and leveraging the capabilities of gen ai. So how will this impact existing processes and how can telcos use AI to achieve their strategic goals? Well, to address these questions, we have panelists from Dell Technologies, Rakuten Symphony, Totogi, and Appledore Research. We recorded a panel last week and you really don't want to miss this one. It's packed full of insights and here's a sneak peek for you.

Danielle Rios, Totogi (02:13):
My message to telcos is, sadly, you're going to have to navigate AI yourself. Everyone's learning how to surf this wave. We're all novices and it's still very early days. There's still a lot of improvement, banked and coming out, and we got to be ready to adopt it as soon as it comes out.

Manish Singh, Dell Technologies (02:34):
It's urgent to get started to really build the muscle around ai, around generative AI in particular, and the reason is very simple. Telcos cannot, must not, should not be OTD on ai, on generative AI

Patrick Kelly, Appledore Research (02:54):
In the context of ai. If you don't have a clear business case, there really isn't anything to follow. I think a lot of the excitement right now is around the technology, but you have to align your business problem with the solution that you're going to develop.

Rahul Atri, Rakuten Symphony (03:16):
I see this as an opportunity rather than something which needs to be thought through in the future. We really need to look at the moonshot, what next big thing telcos can do. This is, again, a moment where the telcos can become more than utility and the center platform for everything.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:33):
Well, day one also features an interview with Alex Choi, the newly appointed chair of the AI-RAN Alliance. He spoke to my colleague Ray La Maistre and provided an update on the alliance's activities, what its objectives are, and how it wants to increase participation from the telecoms ecosystem. Here's a brief look at what he had to say, and you can watch the entire interview on day one of the summit on Tuesday the 15th of October.

Alex Jinsung Choi, SoftBank and AI-RAN Alliance (04:03):
The mission of AI-RAN Alliance is bridging the gap with the practical implementations, therefore accelerating the RAN AI innovation speed. So while the existing organizations have focused on specification and standard, we AI-RAN Alliance is dedicated to providing practical implementation guidance for AI in ran

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:30):
And at 4:00 PM UK time, it's our live Q&A broadcast. Please, if you want to ask a question, then send it in nice and early. We do receive a lot of questions for our live shows, so the more interest in the question, the greater the chance of it getting onto the show. Day two follows, on Wednesday, the 16th of October, the second and final day of our online event, we have a panel discussion that explores where Telco should focus their gen AI activities. Now, given that Gen AI has the potential to impact a wide range of disciplines, how should telcos prioritize use cases? What are the business objectives and what is required to ensure successful implementation? We have panelists from Telefonica, Verizon, Wind River and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and here's a brief preview for you with our panelists discussing how to avoid the potential pitfalls associated with GenAI.

Paul Miller, Wind River (05:34):
We do have to be careful doing it. We have seen generative AI is and LLMs are pretty new technology. We've seen indications, for example, of hallucinations from the AI where it provides nonsensical answers. And so a lot of testing and a lot of rigorous qualification is going to have to be established before these are really used at high scale within a service provider network, so they're truly trustable.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (05:58):
We need a set of anonymized data that we can test these algorithms on to make sure that they're working and the data set obviously has to be big and we have to be careful about how we handle it.

Martin Halstead, HPE (06:14):
A major factor is once you have an application functioning and producing results, making sure that the business trusts it because if they don't, then again, there is a danger that all of that development work just through human lack of trust, it could be wasted.

Antonio Guzmán, Telefónica (06:38):
You have to set up not only the selection of which kind of use cases may be relevant for the company, but you also have to perform re-skilling programs to set up all the teams and try to figure out which is the best option and with which is the best usage of the technology because otherwise the use it and the accessibility to this kind of technology is out of control internally of the companies.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:06):
We also have a discussion on day two that looks at large language models and the opportunity for telcos. How will the development of LLMs impact telcos? Should they develop their own? And if so, how can these telco LLMs be implemented and monetized? Well, we hear from experts from Red Hat, Supermicro, ETSI and TM Forum, and we started by asking about the value of having telco specific LLMs. Here's another short preview for you

Michael Clegg, Supermicro (07:41):
That in order to get the best out of their customer service or even their internal operations, the LLM needs to be able to speak Telco, right, speak the telco dialect. So I think developing a vertical, and I think we will see this in other industries, developing a vertical both based LLM in this case, the telco LLM, that is generic and as it speaks, the telco is references into telco networks, into telco solutions, and that's something that all the telcos together can benefit from.

Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (08:09):
As we start now to migrate to what we call these autonomous networks where networks are self-healing, they're all intent driven, and that is really where large language models that are specific to telco are going to be critically important to do that. If you think of use cases around things like such as IP fault management or optical fault management, ram fault management, all those types of things where we want the network to self-organize and to fix itself, these elements are going to be critical to do that.

Shujaur Mufti, Red Hat (08:38):
There's a big amount of revenue that is generated by telcos on the enterprise, and LLMs could actually play a role in enabling as well as creating new enterprise services.

Scott Cadzow, ETSI (08:48):
If the telecoms industry is going to do any kind of optimization of services, and we look towards six G where we're doing very advanced services operating at very high speed, very specific to each customer, then AI based LLMs are essential. I mean, they cannot be anything but essential, and in doing that, they have to have the language telcos. You cannot import it from anywhere else. And so that's basically where we are. We cannot not have an AI specific or telecom specific LLM.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:20):
And at 4:00 PM UK time, it's our final live q and a broadcast. We'll be joined by more of our panelists who are going to answer as many of your questions as they can. Well, that's a preview of the programs we have in store for you, but we are also running a viewer poll, and we do this for every summit and are always amazed by the number of responses that we get from you. This is the question we are asking, how can telco's best leverage AI innovation to improve operational efficiency and develop profitable new services? There are seven answer choices. Just select whichever ones you think are the most important, and you can cast your votes. Now. The poll is up and live. Don't leave it too late. We will take a look at the progress of the voting during our live q and a shows. Then the week after, I will be joined by my special guest, Chris Lewis, founder and managing director of Lewis Insight for a special extra shot program. Together we will discuss the highlights of our panels and interviews and present the major themes and outcomes, and we'll also take a look at the final poll results and what that means for the industry.

(10:47):
Don't forget to register at telecom tv to view the summit videos. There's no charge. Join our community and be part of the ongoing DSP leaders coverage, and I hope to see you for the AI Native Telco Summit on Tuesday the 15th, and Wednesday the 16th of October. Until then, thanks for watching this preview and goodbye for now.