“Telecom Industry at the forefront of GenAI Regulation and Ethics,” says TCS’ UK and Europe CMI head

In an interview with Telecoms.com S Vijaya Bogadapati, Head of Communications, Media & Information Services Unit for UK & Europe at Tata Consulting Services (TCS), a global organisation in IT services, consulting, and business solutions highlights telecom’s leadership in AI governance and improving customer experience (CX), among other initiatives.

Transparency, quality of governance, and common standards are ‘very important’ to the ethical use of Gen AI and regulatory compliance

“There are enormous differences between pre- and post AI/GenAI ways of working. It is important to introduce guardrails that help organisations approach AI in a standard way. With the European Union and the UK already forming AI regulation,” Vijaya explained.

“It's important that organisations adopt a proper risk assessment and put together guardrails and govern them continuously wherever the usage, whether it is in the customer experience side, network monitoring, advising, marketing, or sales teams and so on. At every opportunity of engagement with customer, we need to ensure that there are guardrails and ethics put in place and that we adhere to those ethics. That is something I see all corporates are taking up and I would say telcos are at the forefront.” he said.

Observing a two-pronged trend for roles and responsibilities, he said that there is either a committee (e.g. AI governance council) or an ethics officer role (e.g. Chief AI Officer) being put in place across organisations. Vijaya also elaborated that there is a need for evaluation. For instance, assessing risk through classifications (unacceptable, low, medium, high) and ensuring clear transparency is in place so that everyone is aware of benefits and consequences.

“I think the transparency and quality of governance becomes very important in terms of making sure that that you are guiding the sales teams, the customer, and guiding the internal teams in the right way. And it is not just about transparency, it is also putting an obligation on an organisation that we are able to adopt these ethics and bring in more compliance into the ecosystem.” he said.

“TCS is no different,” said Vijaya adding that as a result the organisation has already initiated various works that are specifically looking at solutions available.

Major organisational change helps TCS better adapt to the evolution of AI

The evolution of AI has also led TCS to undergo “a major organisational change” to help the business enhance their positioning and their customer solutions.

Vijaya explained that leveraging GenAI for customers can be enhanced through cloud adoption. Therefore, as a starting point, changes at TCS over the last year included bringing together multiple cloud units across automation, AI and other departments under one new unit called Cloud.AI, now the “centre of AI usage” at TCS.

Additionally, the organisation has formed strong relationships not only with cloud entities (e.g. Google, Microsoft, AWS) but also with the likes of NVIDIA, with startups, innovative partners, and universities/academia to bring in the best of the worlds.

By leveraging partner tools and adding their own utilities and assets, TCS is enhancing solutions for the market. “We also launched a platform called TCS WisdomNext™, which is a culmination of an aggregator platform looking at what is available in the market, what tool sets are available, what LLMs (large language models) are available, and see how the industries can trial these solutions and use the best ones available for their enterprise.” he said.

Leveraging customer challenges to bring solutions to the market

To drive innovation in AI and emerging technologies, TCS has created TCS Pace Port™, a dedicated ecosystem with labs across the world. At such labs, TCS builds solutions out of customer challenges leveraging their ecosystem partnerships and own tools. Customer challenges are incorporated right in the design thinking process, and solutions are trialled first before being taken to the market.

Examples include enhancing digital twins to bring the best of AI and embedding the solutions in customer care, in operations, and in marketing/digital marketing. TCS has also identified ways to empower its staff to find solutions that can be taken to the market besides investing in their employees’ skills development.

As such, Vijaya said over 150,000 associates have been trained on basics of AI/GenAI and at TCS’ AI Experience Zone these employees get hands-on proficiency with cutting-edge GenAI-powered applications. These professional developments are done in conjunction with TCS partners and customers.

Telcos show a ‘great deal of interest’ in improving CX

Vijaya mentioned that the rise of AI, especially Generative AI, has sparked huge interest among TCS customers in improving customer experience (CX). Projects focused on CX improvements include proactive resolution of issues, proactive monitoring of certain areas which can enhance the customer experience, whether it is network quality, the billing quality, or the interaction quality. “I see a great deal of interest from various telcos, media houses in the region and we are working on a number of use cases. I see good potential for improving the customer experience,” he said.

While these are early days for the technology, Vijaya said that some use cases have already demonstrated great proof of concept. He has seen a number of telcos enhancing their existing chat bots with significant improvements, e.g. 90% to 100% of some customer enquiries being resolved through chat bots. “But solutions are also going beyond CX,” he said.

To conclude, in these early days of the AI evolution, from ethics to regulation and transparency all the way to innovation and development, we expect more changes across telecoms. It is reassuring to hear from experts that telcos are right at the forefront of it all.