Despite already impacting nearly every industry, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just beginning to transform the world.
With 5G now a commercial reality, the ability to effectively collect, analyze and autonomously act on real-time data is a catalyst towards making the digital economy a reality.
Across industries, AI is being used in all manner of ways to increase operational efficiencies, lower costs and improve customer experience. Just use a media streaming platform such as Spotify and Netflix and you can see AI in action, as the algorithms analyze your user behavior, and that of people with similar behavior, to recommend new TV shows, films, and music. But these examples, impressive as they are, solve simple use cases with simple AI algorithms.
What is AI doing in more complex industries, with more complex challenges and use cases to solve, where much more is at stake? The financial sector is one that comes to mind, transportation another. But perhaps more complex than both of these: communications. Connecting everyone, connecting everything, everywhere, at any time, on demand, is an enormously complex task, with equally complex infrastructure and technology. AI helps to solve the challenges along the way, but it doesn't do so with one broad, general brush. There is no one-size-fits-all general AI that will solve all problems.
CUSTOMER FOCUSED
Elena Fersman, Director of Artificial Intelligence at
'Our AI does not power talking cylinders, create art experiments, label photos or recommend movies and music. It is not a general-purpose tool intended for any use case imaginable, and we don't have brand teams think of cute names for it...we aren't interested in any of that,' Fersman says. 'At
'Because of this approach, we don't sell or market AI as a solution in itself. It comes with what we offer, as standard. I think, perhaps, this has led to a perception that in some way we may not have been associated with AI in the same way as companies who focus only on AI. But for the specific needs that we focus on, our AI expertise and leadership is unsurpassed. We have proven focused industry expertise in AI, so in that sense we are an AI company.'
SIX CHALLENGES
It's with this laser focus on solving the right problems, not all problems, that
Ensure network performance
Improve energy efficiency and meet sustainability demands
Turn operations into an efficient business enabler
Realize the value from cloud and a virtualized core
Create an outstanding, future-proof customer (user) experience
Bring out the most from existing infrastructure
'Focusing on these six specific challenges for our customers allows us to be very concentrated when developing and embedding AI solutions that truly add value,' Fersman says. 'For example, to improve energy efficiency and meet demands of sustainability, we have developed and embedded an AI solution for automated MIMO sleep in radio base stations that provides 14 percent energy savings when turned on.'
'When we focus on turning operations into an efficient business enabler, one solution within our Managed Services Offering - the Ericsson Operations Engine - is able to predict KPI degradation in the Radio Access Network, and now more than 70 percent of KPI degradation incidents are prevented with data-driven operations.'
'The fact is, for each one of these six specific challenges, we have multiple live AI solutions operating in live networks for our customers that are already adding real value, whether through minimizing costs, reducing incidents, increasing efficiencies, curbing energy consumption, or improving user experience. The list goes on and it is something that I am very proud about.'
THE FUTURE
So, what does the future of AI look like at
Q&A WITH ELENA FERSMAN ON ERICSSON'S AI DIFFERENTIATORS
Q: What sets
Fersman: 'We have five main Ericsson AI differentiators that truly set us apart from the competition: Telecom & AI expertise; AI-ready technology; AI use case co-creation; unique access to data; and an AI-powered portfolio.'
Q: Let's drill down into each of these five starting with
Fersman: 'Ericsson AI is built on a strong foundation of combining deep telecom domain expertise, data science and AI knowledge. These skills always work hand-in-hand, close to customer problems, and collaborating to solve them. This means that we know what the right problems to solve are, how to solve them and what a good solution looks like.'
Q: And what about AI-ready technology?
Fersman: '
Q: Tell us more about
Fersman: 'We have learned through experience that co-creation - developing solutions together across competence areas with our customers - is critical. We develop our AI in the field together with our customers with real network data, leveraging our domain expertise and a portfolio of ready-made use cases and pre-trained algorithms that we adapt to various customer contexts and problems. This way we can solve the right problems for our customers, instead of providing an untrained general platform or solutions that only solve very specific challenges.'
Q: What access to data does
Fersman: 'We have a deeper level of access to data than communications service providers for training our algorithms. Since we support and monitor our networks, we get access to very valuable data that is perfectly suitable for AI development, and when complemented with unique access to a wide variety of operational data through our Managed Services offering, we can develop algorithms that are more powerful than those offered by other players in the industry.'
Q: Please tell us more about
Fersman: 'We are not a niche player, focusing on one use case. Instead, we build AI into every part of our portfolio where it makes sense, all the way from baseband to centralized clouds. With AI spread out through all of our products, we can see the whole end-to-end context and how we make every part of the network function together. Our portfolio also comes with AI embedded - it is built straight into our products and ready to be turned on.'
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