At TM Forum’s DTW24-Ignite, the founding members of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) — SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel, and SoftBank Corp. — have signed a Joint Venture agreement. This agreement follows the announcement made at MWC Barcelona 2024 to establish a Joint Venture aimed at co-developing and launching multilingual Large Language Models (Telco LLM) tailored to the telecommunications industry’s needs.
The Joint Venture will see equal investments from the founding parties to support its initial working capital requirements. The goal is to develop Telco LLMs that will enhance customer interactions via digital assistants and other innovative AI solutions. These AI applications will be tailored to the needs of the founding parties in their respective markets, allowing them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3bn across 50 countries. The Telco LLM will support multiple languages, including Korean, English, German, Arabic, and Bahasa. The launch of the Joint Venture is subject to customary regulatory approvals.
The second Global Telco AI Roundtable (GTAR) was also held at DTW24, reaffirming GTAA’s commitment to driving innovation and collaboration in the telecom industry. The GTAR highlighted the significant progress achieved by the GTAA, including the development of AI governance systems and AI use cases that are reshaping the telecom landscape.
In his opening speech, SKT’s CEO Ryu Young-sang emphasised the transformative potential of AI in the telecom industry. He noted that the Global Telco AI Alliance is well-positioned to be a key player in the global AI ecosystem, as businesses worldwide are keen to integrate AI into their strategies. CEO Ryu added that the Telco LLM JV would create new business opportunities and enhance customer experiences. He stressed the importance of addressing the social and environmental responsibilities associated with AI by establishing an effective AI governance framework.
Following the opening address, a panel discussion featured key figures including Suk-geun Chung, Chief AI Global Officer at SKT; Harrison Lung, Group Chief Strategy Officer at e&; William Woo, Group Chief Information Officer and Group Chief Digital Officer at Singtel; and Jan Hofmann, Top Programme Lead for Artificial Intelligence at Deutsche Telekom. The panellists shared updates on GTAA’s progress and discussed future plans to use AI to address industry challenges and unlock new opportunities. They also highlighted the importance of Responsible AI practices.
The founding parties showcased potential applications of an LLM for telecoms, focusing on contact centre and infrastructure use cases. Demonstrations included the model’s ability to enhance contact centre operations by generating real-time reference answers for agents during calls and automatically handling post-call tasks. They also illustrated the model’s capability to provide answers to infrastructure operators’ questions, streamlining their workflows.
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