AI-Faust policy gets customers Mephistophelean good
Middle East telco giant e& (aka Etisalat by e&) is possibly the telecoms world’s most bold pioneer of new technology. Even so, it has alarmed some to see that it is ignoring the misgivings of world-wide worrywarts and kvetchers like Tesla pioneer Elon Musk and Apple founder Steve Wozniak to integrate OpenAI’s GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) “into its internal operations and processes”. It plans to trust the Microsoft-owned technology to develop services that elevate customer experience and support its daily tasks, reports TelecomTV.
Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI which unveiled version GPT-4 of its chatbot in March offers access to ChatGPT through its Microsoft Azure public cloud within its Azure OpenAI Service. Microsoft is the main cloud partner of e& and it announced it had forged a pact last year to aid “e&’s journey to go beyond the realms of traditional telecommunications to transform the lives of its customers and advance the digitalisation journey of enterprises.”
e& boasts it is the “first digital conglomerate” in the Middle East and Africa to use the GPT available in Azure OpenAI Service to improve its customer service and products. It claims this marked an important step in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the technology and telecom sector.”
The aim, is to “improve the e& customer experience and optimise internal operations, including human resources, within the company, to enhance its overall performance and enable faster decision-making by using the latest advancements in AI technology.”
Expect a sustainable and efficient ecosystem, predicted Masood M Sharif Mahmood, CEO at Etisalat by e& UAE. The customer experience improvement aside, AI will help local businesses to grow and become a valuable tool for employees in a company, providing assistance, support and efficiency across all business operations. This can also be a powerful tool for improving customer experience, helping businesses provide more personalised customer support. “In the ever-evolving media industry, AI tools like these can help optimise content as well as improve engagement and gain audience insights,” said Mahmood. That glib advice sounds slightly patronising to this journalist.
With that in mind, Etisalat by e& aims to develop a service that gives the media access to an AI tool that “will assist in daily tasks like content creation, editing and publishing, and allow them to focus on more creative tasks and improve the quality of their work”. Or, as Ray Le Maistre in TelecomTV sagaciously observed, it will allow the telco to reduce its headcount by letting AI tools performs tasks.
Etisalat by e& will also integrate Azure OpenAI Service into its internal operations to underpin a human resources chatbot and streamline processes. “This integration lets the company make faster and more informed decisions, improve key performance indicators (KPIs) and reduce the time and effort spent on daily operations,” stated the company. If so, then there must be something wrong in their own processes.
As e&’s involvement with low-earth orbit satellite constellation hopeful E-Space proves, this is a telco that is breaking new ground everywhere. With e-Space it is pushing the possibilities of global IoT [internet of things], smart-IoT and digital transformation systems. It is also working with Intel to develop technologies that respond to the demand for a sustainable distributed edge datacentre infrastructure. It is also tactfully broadening its portfolio, quietly becoming the apex-stakeholder in the Vodafone Group.