Global Telco AI Alliance closer to co-developing and launching a multilingual telco LLM

Singtel, Deutsche Telekom, e&, SK Telecom, and SoftBank, the founding parties of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA), have signed a joint venture agreement at TM Forum's DTW24-Ignite. 

This follows the announcement by the GTAA at MWC Barcelona 2024 to establish such a joint venture, and marks the founding parties’ commitment to co-developing and launching multilingual large language models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies through the joint venture.

As was initially announced, the joint venture will see equal investments from the founding parties to support its initial working capital requirements to develop the telco LLM that is expected to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assists and other innovative AI solutions. The JV will look at deploying innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the founding parties in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 B across 50 countries. 

The LLM will be multilingual, supporting Korean, English, German, Arabic, and Bahasa, among other languages. The launch of the joint venture is subject to customary regulatory approvals.

The opening speech for the Global Telco AI Roundtable (GTAR), also held at DTW24, was delivered by SKT’s CEO Ryu Young-sang. Ryu emphasised the transformative potential of AI in the telecom industry, highlighting that the GTAA is well-positioned to be an active player in the global AI ecosystem as businesses worldwide are keen to reshape their business strategies through AI. 

He added that, new business opportunities will be created and enhanced levels of customer experiences will be achieved through the telco LLM joint venture. Ryu stressed that while heading towards this goal, the GTAA needs to proactively address the social and environmental responsibilities associated with AI by establishing an effective AI governance framework.

The founding parties also showcased their potential applications of an LLM for telco, focusing on contact centre and infrastructure use cases. They demonstrated how an AI-enabled LLM can enhance contact centre operations by generating real-time references for agents during calls and automatically handle post-call tasks. They also illustrated the model's ability to comprehend domain-specific documents, data, and processes to provide answers to infrastructure operators' questions, streamlining their workflows.