GenAI-Powered Managed Infrastructure Services Help Carriers Reduce Costs and Improve Efficiency

At HAS 2024, Andy Hicks, Senior Principal Analyst at GlobalData, explores how managed infrastructure services benefit carriers and discusses Huawei's performance in GlobalData's Competitiveness Landscape Assessment Report.

TechTalks: Are vendors developing GenAI and LLM technologies in the managed infrastructure service field?

Andy Hicks: Very definitely so. I mean, everyone's going and doing as much as they can with generative AI. We're just at the beginning of the process. So one quick thing that we see many service providers doing with generative AI is what you think of sometimes as a copilot. It's really kind of generative AI with knowledge management. So, if you are working at a network operations center, a service operations center, and something is happening, and you're not quite sure what's happening, well, generative AI can help you access the knowledge because there's all kinds of manuals and incident reports and all kinds of procedures and stuff in the knowledge base.

And it becomes quicker for either the operations person to type in a query or speak a query, and say, “What's going on here, can you suggest something?”

Often, it's now proactive, so that the generative AI system will say, ‘Look, we've got this kind of alert. We think this is happening. Would you like to explore a troubleshooting procedure?’

And so as the operation person says, “Yes, that looks good to me. Why don't you go ahead and implement that?”

It becomes much quicker to resolve a problem, sometimes proactively before it even hampers service experience.

TechTalks: In the GlobalData CLA report, Huawei made the Leaders’ Quadrant. What are Huawei's advantages?

Andy Hicks: Huawei basically has sort of three big advantages. And there are multiple categories to this report and the categories where Huawei came out as a leader were

• Its scale and its scope
• Its network design and optimization capabilities
• Its commercial flexibility

So just kind of briefly to take those in order: Huawei is the biggest managed infrastructure provider for telcos. So, they just have the ability to do all kinds of complex operations, pretty much anywhere in the world where they operate. So they're very reliable. They can bring a lot of scale to bear on a managed infrastructure operation very quickly.

In terms of the network design, just because of that scale and also because of everything that they're doing on the equipment side, on the radio side, on the fixed network side, they have a lot of algorithms, a lot of knowledge that's being turned into AI, to help with the optimization of networks to design around interference, to handle all the complexities of you know massive MIMO antennas, and so on. Really good capabilities there.

And finally, they've improved I think over the last few years, in terms of how well they can match a certain service provider's requirements in terms of how they want to buy services and how they want to acquire certain capabilities. That could be a fee for service, that could be a contract, that could be revenue sharing and a new product, for example. So, they've improved in that regard.

TechTalks: How do you suggest Huawei approaches GenAI and LLM in the managed infrastructure service field?

Andy Hicks: I would say, first of all, keep it up. Huawei is doing a lot of interesting work this year with generative AI in particular, but it’s key to realize that operators are at different levels of maturity and knowledge here.

I see this with our own customers at GlobalData. Some of them are very sophisticated. They're already saying, "Look, I want this kind of generative AI capability, and I want to keep it within these cost parameters, which there's all kinds of things you can do."

But some of them just have no idea and they say, "Look, is generative AI going to replace the AI that I'm using now?" And the answer is no, they work together.

But as part of this service agility and AI agility that operations partner should provide, Huawei should really come and say, "Look, this is our philosophy. But we can help you apply generative AI to what you're doing now according to your own needs because it's not a big bang. You have to do it gradually. You have to pick and choose your areas."

And I think that Huawei, with its experience, and with its work around GenAI, the telecom foundation model that we've been hearing a lot about at this conference, can really help with overall integration of those capabilities into an existing environment. I do think that a lot of telcos in the next couple of years are going to be looking for more of managed operations relationship, and Huawei's obviously pretty well-placed to come in and help with that.