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Episode 23
Data for Subscriptions Podcast

Why Telcos’ Real Monetization Challenge Is Really about Customer Value

Guest

Geoff Hollingworth

Geoff Hollingworth
CMO, Rakuten Symphony

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Episode description

Why Telcos’ Real Monetization Challenge Is Really about Customer Value

In this episode, we dive into the current state of Telco AI, exploring the challenges and potentials for growth. Discover why customer-centricity is key for success and how companies can unlock the power of AI. We also learn about Rakuten’s data-driven approach and the importance of modern infrastructure in leveraging institutional data. Don’t miss this conversation packed with valuable takeaways!

Highlights

In the last year, most of the conversation is tilted towards AI and that it’s going to unlock additional opportunities and use cases, but we haven’t really seen any new use cases or growth sectors being deployed, at least at the scale that we all anticipated. Where do we look for growth, and how does growth look like? Because we attached it to 5G five years ago, and now we seem to be attaching it to AI.

The fundamental starting point that’s always good is do you care about technology, or do you care about customers? That foundational approach to the market defines some of the largest companies that have been most successful versus companies that are struggling to fit in. The biggest companies care about customers and they’re trying to serve value to fit into where customers are looking for and have needs. I think the telecom industry is stuck in cycles of obsession about technology that it becomes very hard to unlock immediate and short-term opportunities.

When I say (AI) is just the latest technology, I’m not belittling it at all. I do see AI as being the next wave of technology change that comes after 2007 when we went Web 2.0, smartphones, mobile broadband, and we’ve seen what happened over the last 15 years. AI wipes the slate clean, but the challenge is that the winners will be the people who are already good at using that kind of tooling and understand that the laggards either catch up really quickly in being good and disciplined, or they’ll be falling farther behind.

There’s a big effort around making everything AI-enabled. Where is Rakuten aiming to go in the next year or so with that initiative in mind?

We should have as few manual processes and tasks (as possible), then we have the monetization and the revenue growth that we have to solve as telecom. That’s what we use Rakuten Mobile as a proving ground of, that we can replicate it into different countries and with different operators.

AI is a more advanced tooling for our existing journey because we’ve focused on automating anything that can be automated in network operations – the planning of networks, the building of networks, the lifecycle support – so we’ve moved all of the required data to do that online into a centralized repository.

At Rakuten, there’s a common data layer with structured data that everyone in the service units and service providers tap into. From a technology perspective, what’s preventing the other (companies) to do the same?

What is currently existing in telecom is legacy infrastructure and operations from the last 30 years. There’s a huge amount of data that flows through the system, but the data is not available or addressable by the business especially in real-time. It’s siloed. It’s locked. So the first thing that telecom has to do is actually what Rakuten has spent the last five years doing, which is building a modern infrastructure, and it’s not the infrastructure per se, it’s the software layer that sits on top that allows you to take all that institutional data and surface it into a consistent, usable form.