Appledore Research forecast that the AI Software and Services spending in telecom will increase from USD 148 Million in 2020 to USD 5.1 Billion in 2025 at 103% CAGR. Major drivers for investment in the AI driven Telco include:

  • Technology advances in the 5G era and cloudification of the network
  • The emergence of new business models in the edge cloud
  • Downward pressure on capital investments
  • Workforce retraining and OPEX efficiency

Applying AI

Applying AI for improving prediction and business outcomes will transform decision making for CSPs in the next decade. AI tools used in the right context will improve customer care, network operations and planning, fraud detection, and personalized marketing.

The abundance of high-quality data, advances in computational processing, and sophisticated machine learning models is reducing both the cost and accuracy of applying AI compared to conventional hard coded methods. Attempting to deploy AI even 5 years ago was not economically feasible. Limited data sets, higher cost computing, and inferior ML models to conventional statistical regression techniques were significant barriers. In short, it was difficult to justify the economic benefits. That has all changed and the technology is actively being deployed in many sectors outside of telecom. Investment segments include natural language translation, facial recognition, advance driver assistance systems, and industrial automation.

The value of AI

The value of AI is that it uses data to discover patterns, and then predict outcomes more reliably than current methods. The power of AI is that it is constantly improving its learning algorithm. The technique called back propagation changes weights in the hidden layer, to achieve higher levels of accuracy.

Real world solutions

The report assesses solutions from Nokia,  Ericsson, VMWare and Ciena:

Why purchase this report

This report is useful for CSPs evaluating commercial deployments of AI technology. It is useful to marketing and product managers who need to develop their portfolios and effectively market to buyers in the operations, planning, and customer care departments. For more forecast data, use cases, and economic modeling of AI in the Telecommunication sector please check out our research page at www.appledoreresearch.com/research-reports/