Joann O'Brien, TM Forum (00:08):
My name is Joanne O'Brien. My role at TM Forum is VP of Composable IT and Ecosystems. What that means is we've been hearing an awful lot about autonomous networks, but there's also a bigger story here. There's really a story about converging the business, the IT, and the networks to get value for the operator in their transformation. And what I want to talk to you about is a step-by-step approach to achieving that value using various models of TM Forum. So we're talking about AI and making the investment in AI, and what I'm really advocating is that there's a huge transformation that we need to make in order to be able to capitalise fully on AI. So there's AI projects, use cases, et cetera, that everyone's been talking about, but really, if you don't have the underlying architecture, that composable AI, API-driven architecture, event-driven architecture, then you really are limiting the scope of the benefits that you can get from that investment. So we're talking about becoming truly autonomous. We need to reinvent IT through composability. So the age-old story of composability and APIs are still very much important as that foundation for your AI investment. Make networks self-governing through autonomy and ensure AI decision making is trustworthy, and drive towards that AI-native enterprise into the future.

(01:37):
So when we think about our work, we generally, particularly in my area of the business, we think from the perspective of the CIO and right across the business. What are the pressures that the CIO has on them? They have pressures from many different dynamics. They have pressures from the customer with regards to higher expectations, pressures with regards to legacy IT infrastructure, pressures regarding costs and trying to drive down costs, huge pressures from the board with regards to making AI investments and getting return on those investments, and of course, risk. Risk has also gone up all at the same time. So the dynamic and role of the CIO has become increasingly difficult in this AI era. So when we think about the crucible of the CIO, you really, on the one hand, you've got the legacy drag of your legacy infrastructure, and on the other hand, you've got the need to get that return on investment from 5G and now AI.

(02:34):
Anthony Rodrigo, CIO of Axiata, put it very succinctly when I was talking to him, and it was really about we need to reinvent IT on a daily basis. We need to shift from those five-to-seven-year monolith transformation projects to something much more finite and reinvent every single day. We need to intensify our AI scaling, and get efficiency and return on investments. In our recent survey, 55% of CSPs said they were still managing three full stacks across their business, which is a lot of legacy and difficulty in managing that. So really, we need to shift to something much faster, reinvent our software development lifecycles in order to get that agility into the business.

(03:26):
So when we talk about legacy IT and what we need to move away from, we need to shift from the monolith and rigid architectures, from manual, high touch, siloed, waterfall, and reactive, standardised, to something that is much more dynamic, API first, event-driven architectures, autonomous, zero touch, agility at scale. We're really after that speed and velocity into the business. But it has to be accurate, as we all know with AI, you basically personify the behaviours that are already in your architecture. So you need to have accuracy and precision at scale and capitalise on your AI investment. So that's really what we're advocating, that you still need to continue with your foundations of your IT architecture and invest in your AI over and above that.

(04:18):
Recent survey shows this is where CSPs are investing right now. So speed and agility, software development lifecycle being fundamentally reinvented through use of agents right across that lifecycle. Trust, cybersecurity, and resilience, high investment, and customer experience transformation. So interestingly, really 88% of CSPs prioritising customer experience transformation as their top investment right now. And what we're seeing is really that it's not focused on one specific area that is getting the best results. It's really those who are investing on their AI for customer experience, AI for BSS, including their ability to monitor and manage tokens, understand how we can drive down cost in the legacy architecture, but also drive up new revenues. So it is those who are managing all the dimensions of experience, cost reduction, and growth of new revenues that are leading the way in the industry.

(05:25):
CSP predictions of their AN levels and where they're making investments. By 2027, just next year, 20% of CSPs expect to be at level four or above for AN levels. And by 2030, so this is the notion of the race to 2030, 80% of CSPs anticipate to be at level four or above for their AN levels of autonomy across their network. So we're advocating essentially a step-by-step approach to achieving that degree of autonomy. Identify your priority areas to invest. Select these high-value investment areas. We call them high-value scenarios. They're essentially use cases with specific key measurables inside that, that will actually enable you to achieve your results, but in a measurable way and in a transparent way. Measure your capability, close the gaps. Understand where you are relative to the best in the industry as well. This is important. The industry is moving incredibly fast. If you're not investing in a particular area, and others in the industry are, just by standing still, you are actually going backwards. So it's very important to continuously understand where you are relative to others in the industry. Design using technical solution packages, which will give you a lot of the blueprints that you need to accelerate your transformation. Implement, pilot, and develop your solutions, validate your progress, and share.

(06:55):
So when we talk about a high-value scenario, the step-by-step approach, the elements that you can get at least from TM Forum, which will help you have a synchronised approach to this, essentially a scalable, repeatable process for driving your AI investment and roadmaps. You can design using value streams, capabilities, processes, data, APIs, KPIs, across all of your ODA from the Open Digital Architecture of TM Forum. That will give you a framing, clear scope of value driven by intent, understanding your stakeholder needs, understanding your triggers and your outputs, your metrics, your capabilities and how they need to mature, your processes and how they need to be reinvented, the underlying data constructs to enable that that are relevant to your context, the underlying APIs that are relevant to that context, plus the metrics, components, et cetera, all in a single package that will allow you to drive forward. So basically using AI and also designing your investment strategy, you can basically collect and see all of these essential elements that will get precision into your execution, and that's really what we're about. Get precision into your execution so you can get your business results faster and do it at scale.

(08:18):
All of these that I mentioned, they're harmonised with each other. They align with each other. They're different perspectives of the same thing using common data constructs. We talked earlier about data, common definitions, taxonomy, ontologies. Essentially, with common definitions used across all these different perspectives, you get a huge amount of precision and increased and improved decision making into your transformation roadmap, all that can be executed using ODA AI-native canvas. So we're ultimately advocating autonomous networks experience. It's not exclusively about the network itself, it's about getting that business value. Look at AI for CX, AI for BSS, two new projects that I run as part of TM Forum, and also your ecosystems work. We need to drive down costs, understand real time what the customer is needing, and deliver on that intention, and drive up new revenues. We have to unlock growth in the industry.

(09:20):
So some examples. China Mobile achieved 30% reduction in fault management mean time to resolution, 30% reduction on their back-end manpower. 5G network slicing, basically some significant values there by using closed-loop automation achieved fully autonomous in 30 seconds. So I'm basically advocating that kind of collective package approach to your strategy. You still need to do the foundations to enable your AI investment. But upon that, take your scenario by scenario, use case by use case, but inside that, unravel it, understand it end to end from a value perspective, understand the capability, the maturity you are and where you need to get to, and all of the other remaining assets that will give you a very structured approach and much fast ability to move very fast.

(10:18):
The three actions: fund your outcomes, not AI projects; build scenarios into autonomous flows and end-to-end autonomous flows; and use the Open Digital Architecture, and that'll help you to improve your outcomes. That's it.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:34):
Joanne, thank you very much. Round of applause.