What’s up with… T-Mobile US, Ericsson & Meta, Telstra

• T-Mobile US swallows the AI pill, unveils new strategy
• Ericsson and Meta are pressing for a change in the EU’s AI policies 
• Telstra has teamed up with Ciena and Ericsson to achieve an optical ‘milestone’

In today’s industry news roundup: T-Mobile US has teamed up with generative AI platform specialist OpenAI to develop a cutting-edge customer care system called IntentCX; Ericsson and Meta are the latest companies to pile pressure on the European Commission over its digital regulations, with the EU’s AI rules under the spotlight on this occasion; Telstra, Ciena and Ericsson are claiming a world first 1.6 Tbit/s data transmission in Australia; and more!

Like much of the rest of the developed world, T-Mobile US has caught AI fever. At its Capital Markets Day event on Wednesday, the US mobile operator not only unveiled plans to team up with Nvidia, Ericsson and Nokia to invest in an AI-RAN Innovation Centre but also announced a multi-year agreement with generative AI (GenAI) platform developer OpenAI that, it hopes, will  “revolutionise the customer experience and reset customer success benchmarks for companies around the world.” T-Mobile US is to combine its “deep expertise in cultivating customer relationships with OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI technology knowledge and world-class research and development experts” to develop IntentCX, “the first intent-driven AI-decisioning platform of its kind,” boasted the operator in this announcement. “With secure access to T-Mobile data and its ability to comprehend customer intent and sentiment in real time, IntentCX will have the ability to apply meaningful understanding and knowledge of the customer to every interaction, offer solutions to resolve issues and even take proactive actions on their behalf. The initial goal is to apply the most advanced technology and business processes, to maximise the success of every customer’s journey with T-Mobile, and in the process, create a blueprint applicable across industries,” the operator added, noting that the platform is due to be ready for action in 2025 and that IntentCX “is a meaningful leap ahead of the limited capabilities of today’s customer experience GenAI and NBA or ‘next-best-action’ solutions.” T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert commented: “OpenAI’s technology knowhow and T-Mobile’s customer savvy are coming together in this unique collaboration, using the potential of intent-driven AI to unlock a world of possibilities that will completely revolutionise how customer love is delivered across our industry – and beyond. IntentCX is much more than chatbots. Our customers leave millions of clues about how they want to be treated through their real experiences and interactions, and now we’ll use that deep data to supercharge our care team as they work to perfect customer journeys.” That’s quite the claim, given how shocking nearly all telecom service provider customer care has always been (I suppose you could say there’s only room for improvement…). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman added: “T-Mobile deeply understands how to delight customers, and is driven to deliver better, more personalised solutions. We’re thrilled to partner with them to build faster, more intuitive, and accessible experiences for millions of people.” Delight? Let’s see how this one plays out in 2025 and beyond…

That wasn’t all that T-Mobile US had to say for itself. The operator also announced T-Priority, a “new solution built with first responders to deliver the unprecedented support they deserve every day”, which boasts 5G network slicing capabilities enabled by the operator’s 5G standalone (SA) core platform. 

And, not wanting to miss a trick to blow its own trumpet (so to speak), the T-Mobile US team also unveiled a new strategy that not only highlighted its AI developments and ambitions but also forecasted accelerated service revenue growth and a massive $10bn leap in the operator’s adjusted EBITDA by 2027.  

Ericsson has joined Meta and others to bemoan the state of AI regulation in the European Union. In an open letter signed by the Swedish vendor’s CEO, Börje Ekholm, and aimed at European regulators and policymakers, the companies claimed that “Europe has become less competitive and less innovative compared to other regions and it now risks falling further behind in the AI era due to inconsistent regulatory decision-making. In the absence of consistent rules, the EU is going to miss out on two cornerstones of AI innovation,” namely the development of ‘open’ AI models that are available to anyone, and ‘multimodal’ models, “which operate fluidly across text, images and speech and will enable the next leap forward in AI,” noted the companies. They added: “Frontier-level open models – based on text or multimodal – can turbocharge productivity, drive scientific research and add hundreds of billions of euros to the European economy. Public institutions and researchers are already using these models to speed up medical research and preserve languages, while established businesses and startups are getting access to tools they could never build or afford themselves. Without them, the development of AI will happen elsewhere – depriving Europeans of the technological advances enjoyed in the US, China and India. Research estimates that generative AI could increase global GDP by 10% over the coming decade and EU citizens shouldn’t be denied that growth.” The companies complain that AI investments will not be forthcoming in Europe because “regulatory decision-making has become fragmented and unpredictable, while interventions by the European data protection authorities have created huge uncertainty about what kinds of data can be used to train AI models. This means the next generation of open-source AI models, and products, services we build on them, won’t understand or reflect European knowledge, culture or languages… We hope European policymakers and regulators see what is at stake if there is no change of course. Europe can’t afford to miss out on the widespread benefits from responsibly built open AI technologies that will accelerate economic growth and unlock progress in scientific research.” You can read the full letter here. 

Australian telco Telstra has teamed up with Ericsson and its optical networking technology partner Ciena to transport data at 1.6 Tbit/s through a single optical channel over a distance of 700km which, the companies claim, is a “world first milestone.” The trial was achieved using Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme platform on a high-capacity data transport network route between Melbourne and Canberra. Read more. 

KDDI, Fujitsu and NEC are among the companies to have pumped funds into Japan’s Sakana AI, which has just raised 30bn yen ($210m) in a Series A round of funding. According to Sakana AI, it is “pioneering the field of evolving cutting-edge foundational models with an approach inspired by nature,” and has developed “a way to automate the integration of multiple foundational models, including large language models (LLMs)” as well as figuring out how to use LLMs to train other LLMs more efficiently. Most recently, the startup claims to have developed a platform, dubbed AI Scientist, that uses LLMs to automate the whole AI model R&D process.

– The staff, TelecomTV