SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel and SoftBank Corp. on February 26, 2024 held the inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) at MWC Barcelona 2024 and announced their plans to establish a joint venture. Through the Joint Venture Company, the five companies plan to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies (telcos).

The LLMs will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots. The goal is to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for additional languages to be agreed among the founding members. The joint venture plans to focus on deploying innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the Global AI Telco Alliance members in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries.

Deutsche Telekom boasts about 250 million subscribers across 12 countries, including Germany and the U.S. The e& Group has 169 million subscribers in 16 countries across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while the Singtel Group has 770 million subscribers in 21 countries, including Australia, India, and Indonesia. The Joint Venture Company will be established within 2024. 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 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, 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 that 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, paving the way for enhanced, personalized, and efficient customer experiences.