AI in the telecommunications industry: Overcoming foundational data challenges

Telco companies generate and handle enormous volumes of data daily. This data includes call records, network performance metrics, customer interactions, and more. Efficiently managing and analyzing this data is essential for:

• Optimizing network performance: By analyzing network data, telco companies can identify and resolve issues quickly, ensuring a seamless experience for their operations and their customers.
• Enhancing customer experience: Understanding customer behavior and preferences through data analysis helps companies provide more personalized services and boost customer satisfaction.
• Fraud detection and prevention: Analyzing call patterns and usage data can help to detect fraudulent activities and prevent potential losses.

Despite leaders aspiring to build data-driven organizations, the reality is that 70% of leaders in telecommunications, technology, and media and entertainment industries still struggle to utilize data continuously — in real time and at scale. Many industry leaders are tackling this gap by using AI and generative AI. But to reach that level of advanced maturity where AI can have maximum value, companies first need a strong data foundation. Going back to data fundamentals ensures that businesses can manage, access, and use exponentially growing data volumes, all while dealing with complex business challenges.

Elastic and Socratic Technologies surveyed 1,005 C-suite, business, and technology leaders on the current state of their business. This research — with data and results specifically from 326 telecommunications, technology, and media and entertainment leaders — highlights several recurring insights about how telco leaders approach business challenges, underlying data problems, and investment priorities (AI, generative AI, and automation) for the near future.

Below, we’ll explore a couple of these insights from the report.

Underlying data challenges can hinder telco companies’ ability to access critical information for informed real-time decision-making. Without the ability to access relevant data and insights in real time, companies are experiencing consequences such as misinformed and delayed responses to market shifts, customer needs, and operational issues. These challenges can ultimately lead to revenue loss, lowered productivity, heightened risk exposure, decreased customer satisfaction, and escalating operational costs. 

As one telecommunications C-suite leader noted in the survey, “The sheer volume and velocity of incoming data overwhelm traditional processing infrastructures, leading to latency issues and hindering timely decision-making processes.” 

Across the board, the study found that leaders are having difficulty getting actionable insights from their data. According to the C-suite executives and decision-makers, 59% are unsatisfied with the data insights they have today, and only 34% are leveraging data insights daily for business decisions. 

To solve this problem, executives and leaders are prioritizing data analytics and data science tools as their top technology investment, as noted by 61% of respondents. As companies work toward becoming true data-driven businesses, it’s important to know how and if the tools and systems in their IT environments are able to provide a single, holistic, and connected view of all data types, across their business. Otherwise, it can be easy to run into data sprawl and tool sprawl and lack a “single pane of glass” that multiple teams can rely on for their data-centric use cases.

Learn what else telco leaders had to say about data and AI by downloading the full study.

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