A 2024 NVIDIA survey found that 43% of telco respondents reported investing in GenAI. This interest was, of course, generated by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT model allowing anybody to ask questions of a large language foundational model (LLM). What is the future for GenAI? Gartner believes that “by 2026, over 100 million humans will engage robo-colleagues to contribute to their work”. Now that is a quick-moving technology.

Over the next few years, GenAI trends are expected to reshape every knowledge-fueled task and role, reconstruct knowledge practices and resources across every industry, and deliver a tenfold increase in task productivity.

Drivers and inhibitors to GenAI roll out

As telco’s experience builds with GenAI, there is general industry agreement that it will bring new skill sets and significant value across the organization – but without a significant breakthrough in LLM development, it will be some time before they can be relied upon to provide reliably accurate answers, speak to customers or be left to oversee a network process unsupervised.