There is No Silver Bullet

According to the Boston Consulting Group, over 50 percent of the world’s total available data was generated in the past year alone but less than 0.5 percent has been analysed or used.

The premise of Telco Data Analytics & AI is that telcos are in a prime position to tap this data and make it work for them: not just to self-heal networks but to exploit opportunities outside of voice and media as the IoT connects people with cars and the places they live and as machine to machine communication helps optimise and automate everything from urban planning to mission critical weather and infrastructure warnings.

Telcos have access to incredibly rich contextual data that can be streamed in real time, such as location, time of day, type of use. All of this data can be used to understand customers’ behaviour and provide insights that enable more personalised services to be offered via the right channels, intelligently identifying who is likely to convert and how to contact them.

The ability to constantly analyse things like customer web chats in real time will offer insights that helps to both identify things like service issues and demand for products and services. This can drive quick actions to rectify the problems before a fault becomes a serious threat, or to inform trading investment activity and time limited offers.

Similarly, such data will allow network operations to better predict and mitigate network capacity and maintenance, thereby reducing the risk of network downtime, customer inconvenience and in the long run, impact to revenue.

Yet AI and ML are, by their nature, slow to perfect. The models need to learn until they reach the stage where they can make quicker, better decisions than a team of trained experts. The volume of information is already huge and, soon, almost impossible to conceptualise. At the same time experts in these areas are in short supply.

This is the intersection for Telco Data Analytics & AI. Strategies to create a sustainable analytics culture will be a key track throughout Telco Data Analytics & AI Europe and its sister event for the U.S. market.

Other agenda essentials covered in both conferences focus on how QoS in both service and network domains can be enhanced with Big Data analytics; and how analytics is best applied to meet customer demands and drive sales channel performance.

The importance of underpinning digital products and services across the enterprise with Big Data and AI is outlined by David Gonzalez, Head of Big Data & AI, Vodafone Group in a plenary keynote in London; while using AI to augment one to one personalisation is tackled by Intent HQ CEO Jonathan Lakin.

Rob Mclaughlin, Head of Digital Decisioning & Analytics at Sky UK picks up the theme in Blending the Human with the Machine, a presentation on AI applied to customer marketing.

Telcos operate and maintain huge mobile and fixed networks as well as the data centres that hold their core computing networks. The infrastructure is extremely expensive to build and costly to maintain, both from an equipment and human resource perspective. Any technology that can reduce these high costs is therefore potentially very beneficial.

Patrice Slupowski, Vice-President Digital Innovation at Orange will discuss Realising Business Outcomes with Advanced Analytics in another plenary keynote for London alongside Lakin and Natali Delic, CTO at A1 Slovenija.

Delegates to the event in San Francisco will be able to hear Jeff Clune of Uber keynote on how the car service company is harnessing the power of AI and gain take-aways about the current AI planning, capabilities, and dangers. Ganesh Harinath, VP Engineering, AI Platforms & Applications for Oath – Verizon will helm a companion guide to capacity planning with Big Data.

Analytics, AI and ML can be immensely powerful, but they are not a silver bullet for every problem. The business need must be clearly articulated, there must be sufficient data of sufficiently high quality to support the approach and there needs to be greater understanding of the technology’s potential in the organization.

Telco Data Analytics & AI unlocks the door.