Traditionally, telecommunications companies focused on providing consumer products such as mobile and fixed-line phone services, internet access, and cable television. However, as the enterprise information and communications technology (ICT) industry evolves, telcos increasingly pivot towards providing enterprise-grade solutions. Accenture projects an untapped market of $700 billion for telcos, based largely in industrial 5G and B2B2X opportunity.

This shift is driven by a number of factors, including:

• Hard to find revenue growth: The consumer telecom market is becoming increasingly saturated. As a result, revenue growth in the consumer telecom market has been hard to generate in recent years. Consumer-focused strategies such as in-house content generation or mergers and acquisitions to deliver transformative revenue growth for investors.
• Growing demand for enterprise solutions: The enterprise ICT market is growing rapidly, as businesses increasingly rely on technology to operate and compete. This growth is being driven by trends such as the rise of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI). EY’s Q4 CEO outlook report showed that 99% of CEOs surveyed plan investment in generative AI technologies.
• Telcos' unique assets: Telcos have a number of unique assets that make them well-positioned to compete in the enterprise ICT market. These assets include their extensive network infrastructure, their deep understanding of customer needs, and their ability to provide managed services.

AI-Driven Solutions for Telcos

AI solutions are a key driver for telcos’ pivot to enterprise. AI is rapidly transforming the ICT landscape, and telcos are seeing AI as a way to improve their operational efficiency, reduce costs, and offer new and innovative services to their customers. Enterprises are investing in AI internally, but they also seek partnerships with AI-enabled organizations.

While many AI solutions in the telecom industry focus largely on customer service, AI platforms such as WatsonX and Microsoft Azure provide telcos with a comprehensive set of tools and services for developing and deploying AI solutions across a wide range of use cases. These platforms offer massive potential for large-scale business transformation, but also require major investment from a resources standpoint. Telecoms need to consider partnerships with market-ready AI solutions that expand beyond customer service chatbots. Ultimately, telcos can deploy AI-driven, autonomous operations to make zero-touch operations a reality.

Gisual: An AI Solution for Off-Network Outage Diagnosis

Gisual is an out-of-the-box solution that can help telcos gain an edge serving enterprise ICT customers, as well as their traditional residential consumers. Gisual diagnoses off-network outages with 99% accuracy in less than three minutes. This helps telcos to reduce the number of redundant tickets and non-productive truck rolls, potentially saving millions in operational costs each year. Gisual offers two data feeds: address-level outage diagnosis, and regional power outage alerts that shows outages in a large footprint like a county or state. Users access Gisual via two interfaces: an API that enhances tickets in a service management tool for automated intelligence, and a web GUI that gives users the ability to view power status and estimated time to repair for an address or regional map.

As a downstream effect, Gisual also helps telcos to improve their customer satisfaction. Gisual diagnoses outages quickly and accurately, and then delivers accurate information to techs and customers via API in a fraction of the time NOCs take to manually diagnose an outage. This enhances the customer experience and can contribute to increased customer loyalty and reduced churn.

Conclusion

Overall, the shift from a consumer product model to an ICT industry model is a critical one for telcos. This shift requires a ground-up shift in operations, and a higher level of sophistication to successfully meet enterprise customer demands. By investing in AI-driven solutions such as Gisual, telcos can position themselves to succeed in the rapidly evolving ICT landscape.