MWC24: Harnessing AI to Modernise Telcos with Tech Mahindra

As a technology-driven company, Tech Mahindra desires to help telecommunications service providers and businesses to make operations and customer service a more seamless experience.

As telcos seek to transform their network infrastructure, new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming attractive solutions to speed up progress.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 on location in Barcelona, Mobile Magazine spoke with Tech Mahindra’s Global Business Head - 5G & Network Services, Manish Mangal, about the company’s goals for its telco customers. 

Manish explains how telcos can simplify operations to modernise their technology stacks, reduce costs and harness AI to improve network operations.

Unlocking vital business ventures

Manish oversees the running of Tech Mahindra’s network services business based in the United States. He explains how the company is very focused on telcos as a vital business venture.

“A very large part of our business comes from the telecom vertical and we have a very comprehensive set of offerings when we look at the problems we aim to solve for customers,” he says.

In addition to helping customers simplify their operations, Tech Mahindra is focused on helping customers to build new technology capabilities and ultimately drive efficiencies towards modernising technology stacks.

“Monetisation is also where we can help customers unlock the value of their assets, both network and the systems to be able to create value for their customers and drive new revenue opportunities,” Manish highlights.

“The way to achieve these opportunities is through a set of three offerings: Network, engineering and experience.”

Manish explains that networks, including radio networks, core networks and data centres, are the foundation. These offer services for planning, designing, building and operating these networks. Engineering then involves helping telco customers design and build the technical functionalities of their operations, such as applications, data and systems.

Ultimately, this leads to experience - how telcos can deliver the best experiences for their customers, ranging from first interactions to day-to-day usage experience.

“I think this is the era of AI,” he highlights. “What we have done really is take advantage of AI and apply it towards the different parts of the telco industry. We have a variety of ideas and innovation and solutions that really drive the use of AI.”

Applying AI: An enterprise-led desire to innovate

Manish highlights how AI can help telcos to operate RAN networks easier. During a rapidly-changing age of AI, he highlights the excitement of new solutions being able to offer solutions across all areas of a business.

“The cloud has been a fundamental path for the last several years, but this is really giving us an opportunity to take cloud to the next level and leverage AI use,” he says. “The use of AI and Gen AI will be supercharged when the data is fully available and it's actually fully rationalised.”

Particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Manish highlights how widespread 5G deployments are now, as business focus is now shifting towards other trends.

“We are seeing a lot of new trends that are coming in. One is clearly monetisation - how do you take advantage of 5G investments and apply these to enterprises for the creation of new use cases?” 

“We offer Network-as-a-Service solutions and private network solutions for enterprises. So all of them are really very exciting around monetisation.”

However, he also suggests that there is currently a large focus around transforming operations within the telco sector. 

“It's very clear that as the 5G deployment has taken shape, the ability to now transform the cost structure for the day-to-day operations of the network becomes a very high priority,” he states. “This is where tools like AI come into the picture.

“It is very exciting to see the industry is still very vibrant, very active and the use of the new technology is absolutely amazing.”

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