DTW24 – Ignite: simplification, platformisation… and AI

If you missed DTW24 – Ignite this year, then Cerillion Product Director, Brian Coombs, has you covered with his usual round-up of highlights from this year’s event. AI remains high on everyone’s mind, but has the telecoms industry worked out its killer use cases yet?

Last month, we were back in Copenhagen for the latest TM Forum DTW event.

If you’re thinking to yourself “it doesn’t seem like 12 months since I read your last blog on DTW,” then you’d be right – after a couple of years in a September slot, it’s been moved to a new summer slot. So, with only nine months since the last one, how much could really have changed and what were the themes this time around?

If you read my recent MWC blog, you’d have seen I was surprised that it wasn’t wall-to-wall AI coverage. Well, it turns out I was just one show too early with my expectations.

In Copenhagen, you couldn’t move without tripping over GenAI-this and autonomous-that. The sub heading for the show – Leading the way to an AI-Native Telco – gave a hint, but a few stats show how much this was on everyone’s mind:

• 50% of all Catalysts had AI in the title or one-paragraph blurb
• Three of the six conference tracks were dedicated to AI
• 60% of all agenda topics had “AI” in the title
• 98% of the stands mentioned AI (OK, I made this one up – I didn’t actually count, but in truth it was probably closer to 100%!)

A lot of these felt like AI was an add-on to generate interest, with some amusing “… and AI” thrown onto the end of something with seemingly no thought. The top prize for this went to Google, who did their famous cocktails at the end of the day. This year the poster advertising it said you could come over “for a cocktail and AI!”

So that was the hype – what was the substance?

There were lots of videos of chatbots, call summarisation and categorisation engines, as you’d expect, with a few starting to push towards voice integration.  I’m sure this will be the big thing next year assuming OpenAI ever gets around to actually launching the new voice mode for GPT.

The most interesting for me was a session on the Global AI Telco Alliance, a group of five telcos – Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel, SoftBank and SK Telecom – that have formed a company with the goal of creating a telco specific LLM, and here they talked about what they are doing and how things are working in production.

In fact, SK Telecom went so far as being the only other company – apart from us – to do a real live demo of actually-working AI software; in this case, an agent assister. Trained on all its company information and customer data it offers an advanced “next best action” to call centre agents in real-time during each customer interaction.

An interesting take away is that it always presented two outputs to the CSR, so they could choose the best and most relevant. It also always linked back to the information source, so the agent could quickly get to follow on information when needed.

Overall, I thought this was a good – clearly real – demo and one re-enforcing the “assistant” part of AI to help make agents better and quicker, rather than replacing them altogether. An interesting view in the roundup afterwards was that telcos should try to own the value play for LLMs (Large Language Models), rather than giving it away, as they had with cloud infrastructure.

Deutsche Telecom also talked about mapping out a journey towards the app-less phone, powered purely by LLMs. This sounds like the Rabbit R1, but with a bit more substance behind it when it gets released, I’d hope.

Outside of AI, there were a few other topics I picked up on as recurring themes:

The need for simplification

I’ve mentioned it before, but if ever I’m asked what the one thing operators can do to make a project more likely to succeed, this is my answer. Whether it’s product consolidation, pre-integrated systems or no customisations, the simpler you can make something, the better.

It’s a message that BT’s Chief Digital and Innovation Officer – Harmeen Mehta – was pushing heavily as she spoke about how they are shutting down 90% of the 1,500 IT systems, including 35(!) billing systems to massively simplify their estate.

Composable IT

This was TM Forum’s push as they launched the ODA Certification process.  Building on the success of the Open APIs, the ODA sets out an enterprise architecture blueprint with the goal of further reducing the complexity of integration. This was the first time I’ve seen some real examples of companies using the ODA to map out project scope and boundaries, which also leads neatly onto my final point...

Platforms

Platforms was all anyone could talk about a few years back, but now, thanks to the Open APIs and digital transformation, it’s becoming a reality for many operators, and they’re starting to see the benefits.

“New EE” is making what seems like a push for an Amazon experience by allowing anyone to sell on its app, while companies such as Norlys are “delayering” into distinct horizontal entities so that they can do business with others at either the Service or Infrastructure levels.

The latter was the subject of a popular panel session with our very own Louis Hall, discussing how this can bring out the maximum value for each part of a CSP’s business. It seems platforms have made it and are here to stay.

Overall, it was another great show, and we’ll most definitely be back next year. Just what the big topic will be in 2025 remains to be seen, but no matter what – I look forward to seeing you there!

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