Committed to pioneering new technologies in the telecommunications sector, Singtel has launched a range of service offerings designed to empower enterprises in their digital transformation journey. Through strategic alliances with leading global telcos, Singtel is impacting the broader ecosystem, driving innovation and setting new industry standards.
In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review Asia, Keith Leong, Managing Director for Enterprise at Singtel Singapore, discussed how Singtel’s initiatives are enhancing customer experiences, raising operational efficiency, and delivering customized, scalable, and secure AI-driven solutions tailored to support enterprises’ digital success.
How is Singtel leveraging AI to enhance operations, particularly in network management and capacity planning?
Singtel is no stranger to adopting new technologies. For years, we have leveraged AI and machine learning (ML) to enhance network performance, streamline operations, and improve customer experience. As technology advances, we continue to embrace new innovations to drive advancements in these areas.
In the area of network management and capacity planning, AI has unique capabilities. We use it for network troubleshooting as part of automation, employing network orchestration to automate the troubleshooting of network elements. This allows us to identify issues, diagnose problems, suggest solutions, and improve overall network reliability, reducing manual intervention.
We are also auto-configuring our network devices, as AI orchestrates the configuration of new devices that come online, allowing us to consistently reduce human error and speed up deployment processes. Automated software upgrades are another area where AI-driven orchestration handles software updates seamlessly, ensuring devices receive the latest updates without disrupting network services.
Lastly, AI orchestrates the provisioning of network services, enabling us to set up virtual private networks more quickly and efficiently, optimizing resource use and service delivery. These features are integrated into our Empower portal, a self-service portal for enterprises, where they can access and manage both new and existing services in one place with a consistent UI and UX. These innovations are attracting international clients and propelling Singtel as a global telco.
What are the impacts of AI on Singtel's service offerings and customer experience?
From the perspective of customer experience, we have AI-assisted chatbots that are not just your typical chatbot; they analyze histories and various interactions to provide personalized support for the client. They also give agents case summaries, reducing human error. Helping agents be more efficient and freeing up customer service time to address complex customer issues is critical. Additionally, having larger volumes of data allows us to extract insights and trends, identifying areas for improvement. We are leveraging chatbots, especially AI turbo-charged assistance, to reduce average handling time and apply AI to business segments like our SME call desk and voice AI to handle customer requests more effectively.
For businesses and enterprises, scam prevention is crucial. We use AI to analyze and recognize patterns of scam calls and SMS messages, blocking them before they reach the customer. Every month, more than 30 million scam calls and over 20 million scam SMS messages are blocked, making AI utilization in this area vital.
How is Singtel capitalizing on the rise of 5G, particularly in terms of network slicing and monetization opportunities?
Digital transformation is increasingly taking place across the economy and various industries, with high-speed, high-bandwidth, and low-latency connectivity supporting the innovation and growth ambitions of enterprises. Our 5G journey began with nationwide coverage achieved in 2022, enabling Singapore to serve as a sandbox for innovation and successful trials in both the public and private sectors. We have conducted about 30 successful trials across industries like aviation, homeland security, and others, using 5G as a transformation engine.
Beyond industry transformation, we are unlocking more 5G network capabilities, like ‘security as a slice’ and network slicing, deploying not only to devices but also to specific locations, applications, and even individual levels. This development supports business-critical and mission-critical applications. With more hybrid work arrangements and a shift towards a mobile-only workforce, base network slicing is crucial for business continuity, collaboration, and communication.
We became the first in the world to offer network slicing features to enterprises commercially, through enhancements to User Equipment Route Selection Policy (URSP). This paves the way for broader adoption, with Samsung, one of the world's largest device manufacturers, as a partner.
What examples demonstrate how Singtel is using 5G technology to enhance value for enterprises?
One example is the National University Health Systems (NUHS), which utilizes multi-access network edge computing to allow doctors to use mixed reality applications for better visualization and organization in high-resolution 3D, aiding in the planning of surgical procedures.
The Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center is another first-of-its-kind initiative, focusing on smart manufacturing. Singapore has become a flagship for Industry 4.0 and smart meta-factories, with the IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6 electric vehicles now being assembled in Singapore—the first electric vehicle smart manufacturing facility of its kind globally. Additionally, Micron has deployed 5G millimeter wave solutions in its flash memory fabrication plant, integrating 5G to augment Industry 4.0 manufacturing applications, such as automating visual inspections and augmented reality operations and maintenance.
In the consumer space, network slicing is being deployed in high-traffic conditions such as Taylor Swift concerts, Coldplay concerts, and the recent F1 race, enabling customers to live stream or share their favorite moments, even in congested environments.
How will Singtel’s global venture with other telecom stakeholders enable enterprise clients to adopt APIs? What benefits do they bring to the wider industry ecosystem?
Increasingly, greater collaboration is needed in the telco space. In 2023, Singtel, together with 21 leading global telcos, formed the GSMA Open Gateway Framework, which initiated a federated and interoperable framework with open standard applications, or application programming interfaces. This will accelerate the development and growth of services in areas such as fintech, identity, smart mobility, gaming, and Web3. This particular framework will connect digital service providers and mobile network operators across the world to seamlessly develop open APIs for third-party developers and apps. This allows us to partner with some of the world's largest telcos, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Reliance, and others.
Together with Ericsson, we have established a new venture to make network application programming interfaces available to developers on a global scale. As a team, we can enhance our offerings and leverage these APIs through the GSMA Open Gateway Framework.
In Singapore, we have developed a solution called SingVerify, a network API that authenticates digital identities registered on consumer services or platforms against telco data. Instant verification of customers’ digital identities via their numbers and locations mitigates phishing and digital fraud. More authentication APIs will be added to the SingVerify suite in the future.
We also collaborated with another local telco to federate APIs at a national level in Singapore, and expanded this initiative to telcos in Thailand and Malaysia, thus widening our defense to cover more than 57 million customers. Partnering with other telcos and being part of an alliance enables us to explore greater innovation.
What other initiatives is Singtel pursuing to enhance customer service through advanced technologies?
One area we are actively exploring is advancing telco large language models (LLMs). Given the vast amounts of customer data we have amassed, and how labor- and cost-intensive it can be to build an LLM for a single company, it is more efficient to pursue LLMs development collaboratively. As such, alongside other leading telcos, we have established the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) to accelerate the development of LLMs, enabling us to make a greater impact globally.
Under this joint venture, we are co-developing an LLM to help telcos improve customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots. This will be available in Korean, English, German, Arabic, and Bahasa, serving a customer base of 1.3 billion across 50 countries, covering the respective markets of the founding parties. The GTAA plans to include more languages and cover more markets in the future.
How is Singtel's NaaS offering helping enterprises address growing demands for flexibility, scalability, and customized network solutions?
Many enterprises are undergoing rapid digitalization and are exploring and developing tailored solutions for deployment in their industries. This often involves juggling multiple tools to manage their network connectivity and cloud application lifecycle, both at the edge and in their centers. Of course, everyone is facing resource limitations and a lack of know-how, and many of them struggle to navigate this space, resulting in slow progress for their businesses.
We understand the challenges and complexities they face, especially in managing various networks, edge computing, and applications. So we’ve developed platforms that enable faster deployment of such services like GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-driven solutions, while removing considerable operational and cost overheads.
On the other hand, CUBΣ is a similar platform for network solutions and services, providing a single touchpoint to manage and monitor network utilization, workload performance, and sustainability metrics using AI-driven and machine-learning predictive analytics. Through these solutions, we create platforms that allow our clients to have a single point of engagement with Singtel. This approach enhances the digitization efforts we are assisting our clients with, providing a unified user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) for engaging with the Singtel team.
Additionally, we prioritize cybersecurity resilience and service assurance, ensuring that everything is cost-effectively managed—that’s how Paragon and CUBΣ were conceived, developed, and delivered to help enterprises meet these needs through a single platform. Paragon is the industry’s first all-in-one orchestration platform for 5G, edge computing, and cloud services. It significantly reduces the complexity and time needed to adopt 5G MEC and low-latency applications and services, ultimately lowering the barriers to entry for enterprises.
