Cloud & AI-Powered Automation: Becoming the Telco of the Future

Today we’re heavily dependent on communication service providers (CSPs) to keep us connected in a virtual-first world and support increasingly diverse, 5G-enabled services. As a result, Telco has emerged as an essential industry at the pinnacle of the technology value chain, and more focal to the way society, individuals, and businesses operate.

But telco providers are facing intense challenges when it comes to accelerating network transformation in a digital age that’s punctuated by a global pandemic and corresponding disruption. This is coupled with the difficulties in aligning transformation efforts with the rapid pace of continuous change, economic uncertainty, and shifting customer expectations.

Ronald van Loon is an IBM partner, and has the opportunity to converse with numerous telco providers to gain a richer perspective of the prevalent network transformation hurdles organizations in this space are currently navigating.

While the fast rate of current change presents pervasive challenges for telco providers, it also offers strategic repositioning and transformation opportunities. Cloud and AI-powered automation are transforming telco operations models at a foundational level, offering more efficiency and agility to answer the challenges surrounding transformation and automation.

Cloud-centric, AI-based network automation enables telcos to transition their networks into scalable, versatile platforms capable of supporting increasing volumes of complex data, and  allowing them to capitalize on new use cases and market opportunities emerging from edge and 5G.

Changes are Sweeping the Telco Industry

Currently there are a few shifts occurring within the telco industry at an elemental level:

• 5G: This is radically altering communication via reduced latency, more bandwidth, and the ability to devote pieces of the network to certain functions.
• Cloud: There’s a push to transform into a cloud platform, particularly hybrid cloud, which will push the industry past multimedia, data, and voice services towards B2B and internal IT services.
• Edge Computing: Increased reliance on edge to enable storage and computation to occur at the point of data generation and processing, when combined with 5G can produce next-level telecommunication services.

These shifts are compounded by challenges, both immediate and historical, that are plaguing telcos as they navigate the complexities of transformation and the need to embrace new technologies to deliver more valuable services to both consumers and businesses.

56% of global mobile network operators have little to no automation within their network. Telcos are dealing with a huge, monolithic portfolio of outdated apps, services, facilities, and infrastructures that have led to technical debt and difficulties in achieving innovation. On top of this, employee turnover has become a serious issue as frustration with aging technologies and systems within a stagnant culture drives employees to search for better opportunities and causes telcos to lose critical expertise.

Telcos are looking to augment their offerings with new edge, 4G, and 5G services, gain more efficiency via automation, and enhance client retention, but are bogged down by service delivery processes that are typically siloed and manual, which accelerates risks and costs while reducing time to market. 

Surmounting customer expectations, massive shifts to digital channels, rising bandwidth demands, new market entrants, and the need to support emerging 5G capabilities are further driving the case for transformation.

But transformation obstacles persist. This includes lack of specialized knowledge necessary to monetize edge, difficulties accessing and operationalizing data everywhere, and bringing the cloud model to network service delivery. However, these challenges can be addressed via network automation that connects the advantages of the cloud directly to the network.

Achieving Autonomous Operations

IBM’s Cloud for Telecommunications is a solution that can assist telco providers in overcoming the unique transformation obstacles they face in a tightly regulated industry landscape with an open, hybrid cloud architecture that speeds up transformation, and enhances agility and digital client engagement.

According to a recent white paper from IBM, “How Cloud and AI-Powered Automation are Transforming the Telco Operations Model,” this new telco operations model is shaped by intelligence, distributed computing, and virtualization to attain autonomous operations and capitalize on new 5G and edge use cases:

• Autonomous transportation: Self-driving cars, buses, trucks, drones, in addition to logistic coordination and traffic management.
• Computer vision: Big data visualization, and inspections for product quality.
• VR/AR: Immersive experiences, including gaming, workforce training, and remote learning.
• Healthcare applications: Remote medical procedures, telehealth, and smart hospitals and ambulances.
• RPA: Warehouse and factory automation, and retail store automation.

This progressive operating model also centers around zero-touch automation that minimizes human involvement other than complex actions like escalated alarms, for example. Leading CPUs are already utilizing the zero-touch model in network operations centers that are becoming cost-efficient “lights-out” centers leveraging machine learning (ML), AI, and analytics.

Zero-touch automation is characterized by:

• Normalized life cycle model: Normalized life cycle operations to allow model-driven automation with CI/CD toolchains.
• Intent driven orchestration: Model the required service operational state instead of pre-programming workflows.
• Closed-loop operations: Effectively respond in dynamic environments via ML and AIOps.

By 2025, one third of mobile network operators will have automated 80% of their network operations, according to GSMA. This push to achieve an autonomous network that can leverage AI and ML to continuously self-learn and respond to network changes as they’re happening will help telcos deliver better, more innovative services with the potential to reshape industries.

The Cloud Emerges as the Telco Game Changer

The cloud powers this automation, serving as the pillar for the autonomous network and helping to support the growing urgency for more operational and cost efficiency. Hybrid cloud solutions can allow telcos to insert more automation into their network functions, make them more software defined, and develop them on open shift so they can build once and run it anywhere.

A hybrid platform approach offers several advantages, such as more dependable service availability with less unplanned downtime, and quicker delivery of new capabilities. Additionally, it helps telcos improve workforce productivity by reallocating employees from administrative tasks to more creative, innovation-driven activities.

Achieving network transformation and consistent improvement hinges on a cloud operating model, as discussed in IBM’s “Driving Effective Telco Transformation” white paper. Telcos should examine their workloads and identify the key things they need to do to transform their operations, automate their network processes, and make it programmable, predictive, and potent.

Also, consider telco transformation as a three-ingredient formula, wherein:

• Cloud serves as the platform
• Data provides the fuel
• AI acts as the accelerant

With this formula, Telcos will be able to benefit from faster modernization and greater agility that helps them keep up with market changes, offer elevated experiences to customers and enterprises, and accelerate the evolution from a network to a platform so they can be a future-facing organization.

It will also enable telcos to broaden their services and support ever-growing demands for digital services and outstanding customer experiences in an economically viable and agile way.

Becoming a Network of the Future

Telco providers are at a crucial inflection point and have to accelerate adoption of the new network operations model to succeed in the digital age and take advantage of the subsequent opportunities.

Telcos must work towards transforming and evolving their organization to become the network of the future, defined by intelligence, autonomy, programmability, adaptability, cost-efficiency, and agility. This means leaving legacy infrastructure models behind and developing a foundation based on AI-enabled automation and a zero-touch operating model.

Telcos can discover more resources and information at IBM to help you address transformation challenges as they further their journey in realizing an autonomous network operating model.