EP 490: What's new in Telco? How NVIDIA's New Announcements Impact our Future

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How we all communicate with each other, right? I think when we think about telco and the telco industry, you might think of just your cell phone or you know, old fashioned, you know, telephone wires, but it's so much more than that. And generative AI is completely transforming not just how we all communicate, but how businesses can communicate with each other. You know, maybe we're going to have personal agents talking to each other, all driven by advancements that we're actually seeing here at Nvidia gtc. So the telco industry is something I'm learning about and I'm excited for you all to, to learn about it as well. So welcome to Everyday AI. What's going on y'? All? My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host and this thing is for you. This is your daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping us not just keep up with AI, but how we can all get ahead and use this information to grow our companies and our careers. So if that's what you're doing, you're in the right place. So make sure you go to our website, your everyday AI dot com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We'll be recapping today's conversation and everything else that you need to keep up. So you know, if you can see, if you're watching on the live stream, you see that we're at the Nvidia GTC conference. Very excited to be working with Nvidia and you know, being able to talk to some of the literal, smartest people in the world in their domains. So let's welcome to the show. I'm excited. Lilac Alon, the global head of business development and telco operations for Nvidia and also who's very cool by the way, in case she has an 18 or 22 year old daughter out there listening. But Lilac, thank you for coming to the show. Yes, had to, had to tell us a little bit about what you do in your role at Nvidia.

Thank you first of all for having me. Appreciate you calling me cool. So what I do at Nvidia, I lead AI and generative AI for the telco globally which means that I go around the world talking to the different telcos and advocate and educate about how can they benefit from generative AI and from AI, how AI can help them transform their business, their network and generate new revenue for them.

So you know, walk us through kind of what that means. So you know, I know that you worked you know for 17 years at AT&T. So you know they're one of the bigger telco companies in the world, right? So you're going out there and you're helping them use generative AI.

How so they're you know, in every enterprise, doesn't matter which industry including the telcos, AI can really help do three, you know what and for the telcos specifically four things. One, it can help them service their customers better. The second thing is it can help them run their operation more smoothly, more effectively. The third thing is really help them think about an accelerated development of their core product. And a core product for telcos is network. And we're going to talk about that. How can it become so much more efficient, how it can be multi tenant. And then the last thing for telco and this is where they're uniquely positioned, there is a bonus for the telco industry and that bonus is called new revenue opportunity, new AI factories that they can play in that industry. So those are the three main things we're talking about and let's take examples because we need the example to make it more tingeable. Jordan so when talking about how AI can help service customer better, this is where we're talking helping agents in the call center resolve an issue for their customer much more faster and easily. This is where digital human can now be a friend center of E commerce and help provide a totally dynamic experience. When we talk about running operation more smoothly I want you to think about how AI can help dispatch technician to the field much more optimized and much more effectively. For example how network can be run much more efficiently. And when we talk about how to think about the core product differently and this is one of the major areas of impact of telco. This is where AI can help the ran the radio access network. It's called AI for rank. How can it help drive spectrum efficiency? For example, how can the network becomes more autonomous? So those are the things that we're talking about.

So you know there's a lot of new announcements that have come out of gtc. Can we talk about those a little bit and really just you know, say how this is going to impact, you know, kind of our day to day lives. So you know one big thing that Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong talked about was the AI factory. So how does that play out, you know, in the telco space?

So remember I told you there is a fourth bonus impact that telco this Is it? So telcos are now playing a big role in, in building sovereign AI, sovereign cloud AI and AI factories around the world. Governments around the world are funding some AI acts. Canada had one, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore. And as those AI acts come in and governments are interested in building sovereign AI cloud, they're knocking on the enterprise and big companies around those countries and say, who can help me build data centers and AI factory for the future? And what's interesting enough enough is that telcos have those data centers. And not only that, telcos also have the relationship with the enterprise, with the bigger banks, with the hospital, with the education, with the governments. And hence telcos are positioned as a very good partner to build those AI factories, those sovereign AI factories. And around the world, there's 14 telcos that already publicly announced it, Telenor, Swisscom, Eliade in France, Indonesia, and you name it. So they are taking part in building those AI factories. And if you remember, Jensen said, it's a factory that creates tokens. And they're playing that amazing role, bringing AI to the country, to the enterprise, to, to the people. Let me give you a good example. Indonesia has different dialect of, of language. If you look at the LLMs that we use today, and ChatGPT doesn't talk Indonesian, right? It's after melee prompt in English. So in Indonesia they create a chahabad model, right? It's the native language LLM. And now what does it do? It democratize AI and gen AI to the education, to the healthcare, the public service. It's AI for good. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. And you know, like, I'm glad we're going down this road, right? Because even as an example, I have, you know, family in South America and my Spanish isn't good at all, right? So, you know, is, is this finally. Because it seems like the pieces are all there, right? You can talk to a, you know, a chat GBT or something like that and get it back in different languages. You know, from some of these announcement that we have seen today, is this going to kind of lay some of that foundation to where in the future we'll just be able to communicate with people in native tongues?

Absolutely. So it's interesting today, all of our data plans, you know, when, when you buy your phone, it usually comes with a voice, right? You can text, can have a voice message as well, can browse in the Internet. Tomorrow, generative AI and AI, the agentic AI, will enable totally new services that will come on your phone and enable a new, totally different experience. So let's Talk about those new experiences. One of them, as you mentioned, it's we are going to converse in our native language. Totally two languages. Two people will converse totally different languages. But there is going to be real time translations and transcriptions such that you'll speak French as your native language, I'll speak English as my native language, but we'll hear the same language as we speak. Because the network, on the network there will be good translations and transcriptions. There will be new services like at home, I can now talk to my camera head at home and stop yelling at my husband to tell me where the glasses are. Right? I can actually prompt and say where did I leave my glasses? And it will come up, right? There's going to be a new era phone, there will be an app less phone. So at mobile or Congress, I don't know if you guys had a chance to visit there, but DT showed a phone totally appless where there's an agent. I'm talking to that agentic AI. And in that conversation of a gentech AI, that agent, I just said, hey, plan for me a trip of a family of four to Hawaii. And it start convincing conversing with me. What are the dates that you want to go? Is there an air company, an airline that you prefer? Do you want a suite or do you want a, you know, a room for four people? Is there a specific area I wanted to go, you wanted to go and through that conversation behind the scene, the agentic AI go fetch the information for me. It has my, you know, as a personal shopper and bring that information. So new experiences as a consumer, it's going to come as a consumer of a telco will be different in the next couple of years.

Yeah, that's, that's extremely exciting to think about, you know, almost an agentic layer right on top of your, you know, phone or maybe instead of apps, you know, it sounds exciting and I'll really enjoy getting 11 minutes of my day back not looking for my wife's glasses. But you know, so that's a great benefit to consumers. But you know, I want to get back a little bit to, you know, benefit to telco and some of these things that were just announced, you know, here at gtc. So one of the things was, you know, this whole concept of both, you know, saving money, right. And this is for everyone, not just for telcos, but also, you know, new lines of revenue. Can you explain specifically how this new technology that we're seeing out of Nvidia is helping both sides of those coins for telcos?

Absolutely. So that's talk about how it can save money. Right? That's a key one. Telco is a, is a good industry where the mode of operation needs to change it, it requires changes. And you see telco every year trying to change by optimizing their cost more and more and more AI. And generative AI is a beautiful tool for the telcos to optimize cost. And that's the reason, Jordan, where if you look at different reports like we ran, Nvidia just ran and state of the AI report we're showing 95% of the telcos are adopting AI. 50% of them, 49, almost 50% are actually implementing and doing it. And the reason is because it has this power to change the cost. So for example, when you are helping with AI to dispatch field technician to the right place, instead of going, hey, let me, let me send them, send a technician to a field because there is a, there's a problem and that technician not necessarily has the right tool in the back, in the back of the truck. Or maybe he's not an expert in solving that existing problem. That dynamic is going to totally change. That technician tomorrow will be the right expert knowing exactly what to change because he's going to have an assistant, an agentic AI that will explain to him how to change, how to, and how to do it. More than that, more importantly, the core network is going to be much more optimized and efficient. And if you think about it, the network is the biggest expenditure of a telco. And if I can use AI to run it more efficiently, I'm saving money. At mobile Work Congress, a company called Dipseek ran, they, they just, they used AI for the RAN and they showed that they can create benefit of almost 19 to 30, 50% efficiency in spectrum. That's big. Telcos are spending billions of dollars in spectrum. Okay, let's take another example. When we're doing assistant in, in billing, amdocs created a billing and sales agents for the telcos. They showed a 50, almost 60% efficiency in first handling time. So you could, you could get a resolution faster. If you get a resolution faster 64% of the time, that means you get your agent to work more efficiently. Right? So those are cost efficiencies. And then we talked about how to create new lines of revenue. Right? That's the bonus part that Telco has. And in creating new revenues, we talked about telco's building those AI factories. That's the first one. And there are three layers in that revenue generation. The first part is Telco can go in and say hey, I'm offering you GPU as a service. You are a company who builds model. You're an education company. You, you just need GPU as a service. There you go. The second layer is Telco can in that AI factory say hey, here is a platform of AI as a service. Those, the customers will be enterprise that have data scientists that knows how to use AI. And the third layer is offering to the market AI services. For example, if I build a billing agent for myself and I prove the value of it, right? 64% efficiency, I can take that billing agent that I built for myself and I can offer it to the enterprise, right? So it can go to an AI as a service. So we talked about that as revenue services and remember how we earlier talked about new experiences. I can talk to my phone, I have a new assistant agent that those are services for consumers that Telco can now monetize as well. You know, you can charge instead of a $150 for those services. So those are different way that Telco can benefit and create both cost savings and revenue.

So I, I, I want to double down on one of those because it's, it's very interesting and I want to make sure that both myself and the audience understands this. So you know, I, I understand the concept of you know, kind of like you know, renting out or, or you know, GPUs as a service, but explain a little bit more about you know, how telcos can offer maybe AI services and what that means. So is that to businesses like, like how does that actually play out right in, in the reality? Because it seems to make sense, right? Telcos, if they have all this information from, you know, encrypted data from just about everyone, they should be able to build, you know, some type of service, right?

So, so not necessarily that so, or, or say it differently as we start offering. Telco has the opportunity to offer AI services to their enterprise customer, which, which means if they're building AI factory, it's basically the home of different developers who needs AI. For example, it could be a company like that that offers services for trying to think a good example, connected cars, right? So it could be a connected car company or services for that. It could be an agent, a small business agent. That's, it could be ServiceNow and IT services that's offer SAP. So think about enterprise services that are going to be hosted on this big GPU cloud or sovereign AI cloud that built by the telco, right? So when ServiceNow is hosted organic SAP right. They're, they're hosting their AI on this sovereign cloud. The telcos can help take that, sell it to the banks. Right. And the good thing is Nvidia has this ecosystem of partners. We have millions of developers that works on GPUs and when telco build this AI factory, we bring to that market those developer ecosystem that the market now can consume and the telco can offer to their enterprise B2B customers. That's one way of looking at it. In other ways, like we looked at it from Shahabad, right. From, from the Indonesia example where telcos can build the foundation of AI for good, maybe a language model and unlock education opportunities. Right. AI for healthcare, AI for services of the day to day. Like hey, I can talk now to the DMV in my native language, right. So those are kind of the examples.

All right, those, those are some great examples. And you know, I think that this conversation has been extremely helpful. But Lilac, as, as we wrap up, you know, maybe just one last question. So you know, with everything, you know, all the new announcements, there's a lot of, you know, buzz, you know, not just here at gtc, but just with generative AI in general. How should we be looking, you know, at the future of the telco industry, Right. I think some people are just like, oh well you know, hey, we're just going to have 6G and you know, everything's just going to be better. Right? But what is this actually going to look like, you know, in the coming, you know, months specifically, you know, everything that was just announced, how is this going to play out?

So there was a big section in GTC about robotics and if you guys had tuned into gtc, you saw a concept that was introduced that was three computer system, right? There's going to be one computer that's going to train the model. There's going to be one computer that would do the simulation and there's going to be one computer that's going to do the inferencing. If you think about network as a robot, those three computer system work exactly for that and that ability to take train this robot that's called network with simulation, it's what we think of the path to autonomous network. Autonomous network is self healing, self resolving network with very little to no human in the loop. So if you think about agentic AI today, right, to think about the world where if you have a Taylor Swift concert that comes to Chicago when there's a 400,000 people out there, the network will know that it's coming, it will automatically configure it. It will simulate it ahead of time in such that when there is actually 400,000 people in that concert, it will provision itself. And Jordan, when you're going to be in that concert, you're not going to lose any reception. You'll be able to upload pictures, you will be streaming video in real time. You have the good quality of service and it will be done automatically. Automatically as my 22 year saying.

Well, thank you so much for for your time to help us better understand not just Telco and all of the innovations that are happening, but also even what has just been announced at GTC is going to impact the industry. So Lilac, thank you so much for taking your time to join the Everyday AI show.

I thank you for having me to miss. Great.

All right. And hey, a lot of great information in there. I hope you all, like myself, got a little bit smarter. But if there's a couple things you missed or if you just wanted more information, we're going to be recapping today's conversation in our newsletter. So please make sure you go to your everydayai.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'.

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