• Telkom Indonesia has developed its own AI platform, dubbed AI BigBox
• Now it has launched its AI Center of Excellence

Indonesia, it seems, is a hotbed of telco AI developments, with national operator Telkom Indonesia becoming the second operator in the country to launch an AI hub in an effort to meet the emerging digital needs of the country’s enterprise and government sectors. 

According to Telkom, the launch of its AI Center of Excellence demonstrates its “commitment to supporting government digitalisation, strengthening industry competitiveness and empowering local talent.” It offers an “AI campus” for collaboration with Indonesia’s universities, an “AI playground” for “practical exploration” and R&D, “AI Connect” as a way for various parties (startups, developers etc) to interact, and the “AI Hub” for the development of “real-world solutions for various industries”.

“We are confident that the Telkom Indonesia AI Center of Excellence will serve as a hub for the development, collaboration and implementation of artificial intelligence, driving digitalisation in government and industrial transformation in Indonesia, thereby positively benefitting society and the nation’s economy,” stated Telkom’s director of IT digital, Faizal R. Djoemadi.

The launch builds on Telkom’s development of its own AI platform, dubbed AI BigBox, which offers a broad range of AI-enabled and related capabilities, such as analytics, machine learning, large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), to the country’s enterprises. Telkom claims various companies have already benefitted from AI BigBox services and applications, such as its chatbot, which “can process over 300,000 conversations per hour quickly and accurately”.

The opening of Telkom’s facility follows the launch in July of the AI Center of Excellence by rival telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), which teamed up with Cisco and Nvidia for a “national initiative aimed at accelerating the country’s AI competitiveness”. IOH has also just teamed up with Cisco for the launch of its sovereign security operations centre (sovereign SOC) – see IOH advances its sovereign strategy.

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV