Vodafone, Google predict good things for AI Booster

Vodafone and Google Cloud have formally unveiled AI Booster, a collaborative AI/ML project.

A blog by James Ma, who is Google Cloud's head of technical accounts for EMEA telcos, said the AI Booster platform was the result of "18 months' hard work," and that Vodafone has made "a huge leap forward in advancing its AI [and ML] capabilities at scale."

"For Vodafone," continued Ma, "a key driver is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, enabling predictive capabilities in enhancing the customer experience, improving network performance, accelerating advances in research, and much more."

Figure 1: (Source: Piranhi/Alamy Stock Photo)

Vodafone has been referencing AI Booster on and off for some months. A previous blog by Sobhan Afroosheh, Vodafone's lead cloud solution architect, gives a detailed lowdown of AI Booster.

Ma's blog, however, is apparently the first time both Google Cloud and Vodafone have made a joint comment about the project. Within Ma's blog, Ashish Vijayvargia, analytics product lead at Vodafone, describes "cutting-edge" MLoperations (MLOps) based on "best-in-class Google Cloud architecture with in-built automation, scalability and security."

"The result," he claimed, "is we're delivering more value from data science, while embedding reliability engineering principles throughout."

Vertex-AI boost

AI Booster is described as a "unified machine learning platform," which sits on top of Google Cloud, a big data analytics platform that Vodafone has been developing with Google since 2019.

In the words of Vodafone's Afroosheh, AI Booster is designed to "capture all aspects of the machine learning journey, from data validation, data preparation, feature generation, training, and prediction, through to operations and monitoring."

And by using Google's cloud-native Vertex AI technology, Vodafone says it's not starting from scratch in developing AI/ML use cases. It can scale up much more easily.

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According to Vodafone and Google Cloud, AI Booster is capable of handling thousands of ML models a day across more than 18 countries. This in turn, they say, maximizes the value of data and assists Vodafone's data scientists and developers by reducing time from proof of concept to production from five months to around four weeks.

"Together, we've used the best possible ML Ops tools and created Vodafone's "AI Booster Platform" to make data scientists' lives easier, maximize value and take co-creation and scaling of use cases globally to another level," said Cornelia Schaurecker, Global Group Director for Big Data & AI at Vodafone.

— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading