SKT, Singtel, SoftBank, Deutsche Telekom and e& Group to set up LLM joint venture

Five telco operators – SK Telecom (SKT), Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel and SoftBank – are planning to set up a joint venture focused on building telco-specific LLMs (large language models) to help industry players raise the level of their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots.

The announcement was made today at the inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) currently running in Barcelona.

The goal is also to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for other languages like Bahasa so that it can be deployed in Southeast Asia.

"We as telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telco operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit. Our ultimate goal is to discover new business models by redefining relationships with customers. The Global Telco AI Alliance brings synergy to its members by allowing them to achieve more by working as a team," said SKT CEO Ryu Young-sang in a statement.

The joint venture plans to focus on deploying AI applications tailored to the needs of GTAA members in their respective markets, enabling them to collectively reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries.

"With leading telcos from three different continents working on this innovative model, this unprecedented effort to scale AI development for the telecom industry would not have been possible had we all decided to go it alone," said Yuen Kuan Moon, group chief executive officer at Singtel.

A game changer

Yuen said the planned LLM joint venture promises to be a game changer for any telco operator looking to lift its customer experience beyond limited automated responses and generic chatbot interactions.

"This multi-lingual LLM tailored for telcos will greatly expand chatbot capabilities with relevant responses to customers' technical queries, freeing up service agents to deal with more complex customer issues and we intend to deploy this across the Singtel Group," he added.

Compared to general LLMs, telco-specific LLMs are more attuned to the telecommunications domain and better at understanding user intent.

By making it easier for telcos to deploy high-quality generative AI models swiftly and efficiently, telco-specific LLMs are expected to help accelerate AI transformation of various telco business and services, including customer service, the companies said.

The LLMs are currently being optimized. Telcos' customer service data is used to fine-tune the model for telco-specific questions. This is because tariff and contract models, and information on special hardware such as the router, for example, are rarely found in the general training data of the large models. But it's exactly this content that a telco bot needs to know so it is able to understand, summarize and respond to these specific concerns.

This targeted training ensures the LLM understands the unique language and needs of telecom operators.

"We want our customers to experience the best possible service. AI helps us do that. Already today, more than 100,000 customer service dialogs a month in Germany are handled by Generative AI. By integrating telco-specific large language models, our 'Frag Magenta' chatbot becomes even more human-centric: AI personalizes conversations between customers and chatbots. And our joint venture brings Europe and Asia closer together," said Claudia Nemat, board member for technology and innovation at Deutsche Telekom.