Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:12):
AI and automation will reshape the landscape of telecom operations beyond automation and orchestration, both now and in the future, Mehran Hadipour, vice President of Business Development and Technology Alliances at Rakuten Symphony is here to share his insights on AI's current impact and its potential. Mehran, thank you for joining us today. So how has AI already impacted the way operators deliver and manage their services? And in which specific areas have you observed this activity?

Mehran Hadipour, Rakuten Symphony (00:46):
Great question. If you look at this whole AI journey, it's been incredibly fast in terms of innovation that's coming to market. A lot of aspects of people's businesses are getting impacted, and telecom is no exception operation. If you think about what telcos deal with is often not only the most complicated, but also the most expensive part of running a network. In some studies show almost 70% of the cost of running a telco network is managing the operation aspect of telco network as opposed to CapEx. We see a lot of potential for AI in terms of improving operations. I mean, this whole nirvana of getting to self-managed network could be helped greatly with what AI can do and number of things you can think about that has already happened. Including, for example, ability to provision the network automatically ability to do KPIs and using AI engine to analyze performance and optimize the network infrastructure delivery. For example, look at how network is performing and they change the power state, for example, with certain set of servers in the region because they're not being utilized. And as such, save significant power or reprovision additional infrastructure when performance is required and do it all that using complicated considerations of AI models and KPI driven automation and combination. So I think operations is probably a lowest hanging fruit in terms of the initial and if it's already been realized, I think it to some extent.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (02:59):
So beyond automation and service orchestration, what other areas do you see potential for AI to transform telecom operations?

Mehran Hadipour, Rakuten Symphony (03:09):
A great thing that we've seen AI do beyond just service delivery and service management is how customers behaviors are modeled and how do you interact with them in terms of making sure they have the optimum service. And also if you think about an operator, they have almost a gateway to a person's habits and behaviors and usage and location. And the immense amount of data that exists from the users view and optimizing your offering and services and how things are delivered to the end user needs much more better to reduce churn, to eliminate issues, to provide additional services beyond. So this revenue acceleration that could be achieved with AI modeling of end user behavior could be even a bigger factor than operational savings in terms of how operators could optimize and not only the service they deliver, but what kind of services they deliver and how do you plan different consumption models, for example, based on what really wants and how they use the platform. And so I think that's another almost a greenfield for using AI for operators going forward.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:00):
So Mehran, what role do you envision for automation and ai, particularly in the context of, you mentioned self-managed networks. How do you envision that unfolding?

Mehran Hadipour, Rakuten Symphony (05:12):
I think to me, the whole evolution of OAN and open networks and containerize network function delivery and ability to do network as software is opening doors to a new level of automation and flexibility for operators. AI could be a big factor around everything that manages that software, both in terms of provision, how they're provisioned. Then underlying infrastructure is provisioned on how or how network services are sliced and managed and delivered. All of that could benefit greatly using ization of management and operations as well as ization of the whole infrastructure delivery on top of it. So I would envision a point that you could basically get a use case in mind and have the AI dictate where to place your genome, the antennas, how do you orient 'em all from population behavior in the region, the mapping of the sites, the configuration of the network, how even extending it to capabilities that is being built around management of radio networks to rip functionality could be also driven to comprehensive AI models. So getting to a point that not only the network is provisioned, whether gives the most benefit to the user, but also is optimized on an ongoing basis as change happens, as consumption patterns changes as the events occur, especially in the private 5G use case, AI models, modeling and ai, AI driven network management could be a huge help in terms of fastest and reaction and most optimiz delivery.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (07:47):
How does cloud technology contribute to automation in telecom and do you see a trend toward a unified cloud platform for both telecom and enterprise workloads?

Mehran Hadipour, Rakuten Symphony (07:58):
Oh yeah, that's a great question. If you look back to this whole journeying of virtualization and the benefits that the enterprise customers achieved and this whole cloudification and public cloud, private cloud, the benefits received by the providers have been tremendous. But this whole new generation of virtual ion is now evolving, right? The cloud native network service delivery is going to change how everything is deployed in the telecom infrastructure. I mean, this is something that is been rampant in enterprise sector for quite a while. Launch service providers such as Facebook or AWS has been using this technology in Google at scale for a while, is now finding its way to telecom world. The benefit that they receive are significant and profound and could change the whole way network service are delivered. I project that in a few years, most network functions would be containerized network functions.

(09:20):
Just the efficiency that they deliver and the ease of management and provisioning promotes this trend in a significant way and even more than what it did in the enterprise world. And I see a whole unified cloud model that all the enterprise workloads that are running currency on content infrastructure and it is being evolving and all the telco functions are running on a common cloud and they're managing a unified fashion. And every component of the cloud data infrastructure is managed centrally. And this whole segregation of telco stuff is different and we need something new technology to achieve. It is no longer a factor. There are a number of technologies that made that happen. For example, ability to add cloud native storage to Kubernetes to be able to make it support stateful workload is a key factor because most things that TECO workload require state and Kubernetes by default, it was stateless. So there are cloud native source technologies, especially the one that we provide that provides high speed storage functionality to Kubernetes, allowing you to run a stateful workload and protected and manage, which is going to change the game for the operators and promote a much faster move to cloud native going

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (10:54):
Forward. Well, Mehran, thank you very much for joining us today and sharing those valuable insights.

Mehran Hadipour, Rakuten Symphony (11:01):
Thank you for your time and a pleasure meeting as well.