Take It Steady: Getting the Most out of Generative AITake It Steady: Getting the Most out of Generative AI

Businesses that understand their data strategy will be best positioned to extract true value from generative AI

Ashwin Menon, head of product, Subex

October 3, 2024

3 Min Read
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The excitement around the emergence of generative AI is wide-ranging and there is no doubt about its potential to disrupt and revolutionize myriad processes and behaviors. In telecommunications (telco) business assurance specifically, generative AI is poised to reshape the operational landscape, as it not only analyzes big data but creates invaluable insights and executes actions based on that information. Generative AI can deliver dynamic solutions in anticipation of issues and challenges, driving proactive decision-making.

Telco businesses are evolving to be ecosystem-based and the more players and links there are, the more opportunities exist for poorly executed operational processes and lost revenue. The complexity of the myriad interactions in those ecosystems is now simply too great for traditional approaches to manage. This leads to revenue leaking away undetected, either through inefficiency or stolen through fraud. Properly integrated generative AI can transform the business assurance model and taking a pragmatic approach to introducing generative AI into the existing business assurance team can help future-proof developing processes.

Structured Approach

It’s not difficult to understand the concept of generative AI – the barriers to its success lie in the execution, so it is essential for a business to have its data strategy locked down before looking to leverage generative AI. How and from where data is gathered, where it is aggregated, how its health is assessed, how it is stored and for how long – all this needs to be clear.

Related:More Than Words: How to Build Human Expertise into Generative AI Models

We advise our customers to take a steady, structured approach: start with monitoring the data, conducting root cause analysis and then move to the configuration of generative AI. Processing the data is all very well but it’s extracting the usefulness that is key. The ‘squad’ of generative AI agents is essentially a group of sub-programmes – one mining the data, one classifying insights into good and bad buckets, one executing workflows and so on. Understand what you need before moving to the operational stage.

Generative AI agents can enhance operations across telcos’ business assurance teams, taking the burden away from human capital and freeing people up to work on higher value tasks. With telcos’ customer expectations rising relentlessly while budgets are stagnating, implementing generative AI in a tempered manner can deliver impressive results in terms of time saved and return on investment.

Generative AI Is Not a Panacea

However, the true value of generative AI can only be extracted if it is implemented on top of firm business foundations. There is a tendency to dive headfirst into a new technology, especially one with the magnetism of generative AI. But the value of that technology needs to be properly defined.

Related:From Experimentation to Maximizing ROI with Strategic AI Integration

Businesses need to ask key questions – what will this technology achieve for my organization? What am I missing today that I can achieve with generative AI?  The business case – the business problem – must be clearly articulated and that is critical to the success of any generative AI project.

Generative AI is not a panacea and no one can yet claim to be an expert but businesses that truly understand their data strategy and the issues that need to be addressed will be best positioned to extract the true value.

About the Author

Ashwin Menon

head of product, Subex, Subex

Ashwin is head of product at Subex, an enterprise software company that provides digital trust products to communication service providers. During his decade at Subex, he has worked in engineering, sales and consulting, resulting in a well-rounded understanding of RAFM products and services.

Ashwin is also a member of the RAG Steering Committee, representing the interests of major sponsor Subex and the vendor community more generally.

Before joining Subex, Ashwin studied for his degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology.

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