Vodafone: AI in Telecommunications Still in Early Stages

Faced with the question of whether AI has fully realized its potential in the telecommunications industry, Vodafone executive Ignacio Garcia bluntly replied, ‘The answer is no.’ However, he immediately added that this is actually good news. He pointed out that ‘we have seen tremendous opportunities in the field of AI’.

As the CIO of Vodafone Italy and the Global Director of Data Analytics and AI at Vodafone Group, Garcia emphasized Vodafone’s existing work in AI, particularly Generative AI (GenAI), during a panel discussion on “Artificial Intelligence in Telecommunications: Implementation Challenges and Opportunities” hosted by Analysys Mason. Its main goal is to improve employee productivity, restructure business processes, and launch AI based products and services.

Strategies and achievements

Garcia mentioned that Vodafone has decided to collaborate with companies such as Google and Microsoft to build infrastructure and adopt a multi vendor approach to handle large language models (LLMs), allowing the company to focus on application development and rely on a powerful architecture to achieve flexible switching between LLMs.

The strategy of operators is to achieve differentiation through applications. Garcia emphasized the efforts in the customer service field, such as ensuring that customers only need to ask once and Vodafone will respond. If the customer’s call cannot be answered immediately, the company will call back to solve the problem without the customer contacting again, in order to simplify the customer experience.

In addition, Garcia also pointed out significant productivity gains, such as a 20% time efficiency improvement achieved by an application designed to respond to enterprise customer needs. Vodafone is still using GitHub Copilot, and over 30% of the code recommendations have been accepted by developers.

Expectation

Despite seeing encouraging results, Garcia believes that AI in the telecommunications industry is still in its early stages. In three years, the telecommunications industry will be completely different, providing excellent customer experience, significant changes in cost structure, and product and service catalogs that can better serve customers