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A Memorandum of Understanding to form the JV was signed last year
The founding partners of the Global Telco AI Alliance, Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom, e&, Singtel and SoftBank have this week signed a joint venture for telco AI development.
Specifically, the five companies have agreed to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) that are specifically designed to meet telco needs, in areas such as improving customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots. The LLMs will be tailored to the needs of the five companies in their respective markets, allowing them to reach a combined customer base of around 1.3 billion people in 50 countries. The LLMs will be multilingual in languages such as Korean, English, German, Arabic and Bahasa, among other languages.
Each company will invest in the JV equally, “to support its initial working capital requirements to develop the Telco LLM” explains the press release.
The Alliance was established in July last year, with the aim of collaborating on the use of AI to create new customer experiences and business opportunities. At the Alliance’s inaugural meeting at Mobile World Congress Barcelona back in February, the founders announced their intention to establish the JV within the year.
“Our shared goal is to redefine industry paradigms, establish new growth drivers through AI-powered business models, and pave the way for a new era of strategic cooperation, guiding our industry towards an exciting and prosperous future,” said the companies in the announcement’s press release.
The second Global Telco AI Roundtable was held this week at DTW 2024 in Copenhagen, where the parties each demonstrated their potential applications of an LLM for telcos, focussing on contact centre and infrastructure use cases.
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