TM Forum and AWS offer GenAI help to operators

• The Generative AI Maturity Interactive Tool (GAMIT) has been unveiled at TM Forum’s Innovate Americas event
• The purpose of GAMIT is to speed up operators’ generative AI efforts and prioritise “high-value” use cases
• TM Forum finds the majority of communication service providers are woefully unprepared for AI and GenAI, as they are bogged down by a lack of leadership and expertise

TM Forum, a member-driven alliance of telcos and their suppliers, has teamed up with public cloud behemoth Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help communication service providers (CSPs) speed up their generative AI (GenAI) efforts. Together, they have developed GAMIT, the Generative AI Maturity Interactive Tool, which was officially unveiled today at Innovate Americas, a TM Forum event held in Dallas.

The purpose of GAMIT is to help CSPs quickly benchmark their GenAI maturity against that of their peers, prioritise “high-value” GenAI use cases and then wheel them out as soon as possible. GAMIT is able to do this, asserted TM Forum, by drawing on anonymised, aggregated data from more than 240 AI decision-makers at CSPs worldwide.

After the extensive data collection, TM Forum and AWS said they embarked on a “rigorous design and testing phase to ensure [GAMIT’s] accuracy and reliability”. The result, claimed the duo, is a “user-friendly, interactive tool that delivers clear value to the telco industry globally and exemplifies TM Forum’s mission to help CSPs and their suppliers to transform and thrive in the AI era.”

GAMIT to the GenAI rescue

TM Forum says most CSPs are ill-equipped to take advantage of any business value upsides that GenAI might bring, largely because they lack a gauge by which to assess their organisation’s readiness to benefit from the technology.

Moreover, the necessary GenAI skills for “accurate results” are apparently sorely lacking. Only a quarter of operators, according to TM Forum research, feel able to leverage “advanced techniques”, such as fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), while even fewer (16%) think they are confident enough in using these methods to optimise costs and bolster return on investment.

Underlining the need for GAMIT, TM Forum pointed out, is a lack of AI leadership and “dedicated strategy” among an overwhelming majority of CSPs. The upshot? Only 14% of operators have more than 10 GenAI use cases in production, just one-third report having a “robust” GenAI pipeline, and many CSPs are “struggling to move from bolt-on solutions to integrating AI as a built-in, native element across all operations.” TM Forum added that the most common barrier to advancing GenAI initiatives is the lack of accuracy in proof-of-concept stages.

“Generative AI offers an unprecedented opportunity for CSPs to drive revenue growth and operational efficiency, but concerns around technical expertise, demonstrable use cases and accuracy are hindering their ability to fully realise its benefits,” said TM Forum CTO George Glass.

Although GenAI is now beyond the hype cycle, it didn’t stop TM Forum from brandishing some very large numbers as a reminder to CSPs of what they might be missing out on if they don’t get more AI and GenAI savvy. It cited estimates from a “recent” report by McKinsey (published in February 2024) that $100bn in incremental value, and up to $180bn in productivity gains, could be realised by telcos worldwide through GenAI.

TelecomTV notes, however, that these estimates were based on data from an earlier McKinsey report published well over a year ago (June 2023) when the GenAI hype cycle was in much fuller swing than it is now.

The launch of GAMIT comes on the same day that UK national telco BT unveiled its GenAI Gateway, which has been designed in collaboration with AWS to help BT staff to make the best use of a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) systems and large language models (LLMs) – see BT embraces GenAI with help from AWS.

- Ken Wieland, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV