Focuses on high level data from a November 2023 survey that provides insights into telcos’ AI maturity and GenAI adoption and use cases.
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Summary
In November 2023, Omdia surveyed communications service providers (CSPs) about their current and planned use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The full results of the study will be published in January 2024. This opinion piece focuses on a subset of high level data that provides insights into AI maturity and GenAI adoption and use cases.
AI maturity
Omdia uses specific metrics to assess a company’s AI maturity, including data governance, key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the impact of AI, and the presence of a dedicated budget for AI projects. In previous Omdia studies, the telecom industry has generally ranked toward the middle of the pack in terms of deployments.
In this most recent survey, focused exclusively on GenAI, around half of respondents rated their organization’s AI maturity as being on par with that of their competitors. A nearly equal number said their organization’s maturity was more advanced than or lagging competitors.
The results for Omdia’s maturity KPIs tend to support this assessment. 53% have an established data governance process, 78% have KPIs in place or planned within a year, and 65% have a budget in place or in the approval process.
GenAI adoption and use case analysis
Just over half of respondents indicated they are currently researching GenAI, and the remainder have already deployed it. As shown in Figure 1, more than three-quarters of them either have deployed or are trialing or testing chatbots/virtual assistants, and nearly as many are doing the same for anomaly detection.
Figure 1: Proportion of CSPs deploying, trialing, or testing GenAI use case
Source: Omdia, n=40
Consistent with the above finding, when asked which use cases would be most affected by GenAI, chatbots, call centers, and anomaly detection were the top three selections.
Figure 2: Use cases that will be most impacted by GenAI
Source: Omdia, n=40
One interesting finding confirms what Omdia has predicted in previous reports—that the greatest impact of GenAI will be on reducing costs rather than on increasing revenue. As shown in Table 1, CSPs expect GenAI to have the most impact on cost reduction, with employee efficiency a close second. “Revenue generation” was not ranked as having the highest impact for any of the 10 use cases Omdia asked about. The only use case that looks to threaten jobs is network planning/design, and even there, the impact is expected to be minimal.
Call centers—where chatbots and virtual assistants are already being deployed—showed “employee efficiency” as number 1 and “change in number of employees” as number 5. These results perhaps help put to rest the notion that CSPs are deploying GenAI to replace people.
Table 1: Ranking of GenAI impact on business outcomes
Business outcome | Average rank (1=most impact) |
Cost reduction | 1.9 |
Employee efficiency | 2.1 |
Customer experience | 2.4 |
Revenue generation | 4.0 |
Change in number of employees | 4.6 |
Source: Omdia
Coming up
The full report, due in January 2024, will provide greater granularity on and deeper analysis of the areas discussed here, as well as the following topics:
- Confidence levels for GenAI having a positive impact on business goals in the next two years
- Plans for end-user services based on GenAI
- Organization considerations
- GenAI vendor preferences and decision criteria
- Deployment plans
- Barriers to adoption
Appendix
Further reading
Telco positioning in the generative AI ecosystem (November 2023)
2024 Trends to Watch: Telco AI (November 2023)
“Digital Transformation World 2023 Reveals Maturation of AI for CSPs” (October 2023)
Generative AI Software for Telecom: Market Sizing and Forecasts (October 2023)
State of Play of AI in Telecoms (October 2023)
“GenAI in telecom operations – living up to the hype” (July 2023)
“CSPs are progressing on their AI journey” (June 2023)
Author
Roz Roseboro, Principal Analyst, Service Provider Transformation
