SK Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, Singtel, e& Group and Softbank hook up on LLMs for customer service
SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel and
SoftBank have set up a jv called the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telcos.
SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel and SoftBank have set up a jv called the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telcos.
Pictured st the inaugural meeting are: SK’s Chairman Chey Tae-won, SKT’s CEO Ryu Young-sang, Deutsche Telekom’s CEO Tim Höttges and DT’s Board Member for Technology & Innovation, Claudia Nemat, e& Group’s Group CEO Hatem Dowidar, Singtel Group’s CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, and SoftBank’s CISO Tadashi Iida.
The LLMs designed by the jv will be to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots.
The goal is to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for additional languages to be agreed among the founding members.
Compared to general LLMs, telco-specific LLMs are better at understanding user intent. The LLMs are currently being optimized. Telcos’ customer service data is used to fine-tune the model for telco-specific questions.
This is because tariff and contract models, information on special hardware such as the router, for example (e.g. How do I do a reset?) are rarely found in the general training data of the large models. But it’s exactly this content that a telco bot needs to know. So that it is able to understand, summarize and respond to these specific concerns.
This targeted training aims to ensure that the LLM understands the unique language and needs of telecom operators, paving the way for enhanced, personalised, and efficient customer experiences.
“We as telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telco operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit. Our ultimate goal is to discover new business models by redefining relationships with customers,” says Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT.
“Already today, more than 100,000 customer service dialogs a month in Germany are handled by Generative AI,” says DT’s Claudia Nemat, “by integrating telco-specific large language models, our ‘Frag Magenta’ chatbot becomes more human-centric.”
“From streamlining customer support interactions to enabling personalised recommendations, this LLM will revolutionise how businesses engage with customers”, says e&’s Dena Almansoori.
“This LLM tailored will greatly expand chatbot capabilities with relevant responses to customers’ technical queries,” says Singtel’s Yuen Kuan Moon.