Google Cloud has released a report that looks at general artificial intelligence (AI) and its offshoot, agentic AI, with specific attention on the telecommunications industry.
The report found that the utilization is wide, deep, and growing. Conducted by Google Cloud and National Research Group, the report says that 56% telecommunications executives surveyed said that they are using agentic AI.
The report, conducted from April 18 to June 3, is based on responses from 489 executives from companies with either more than 100 employees and $10 million in annual revenue.
It found a wide variety of AI implementations. The report found 47% of telecommunications companies are using AI for security operations and cybersecurity, 46% for tech support, 45% for customer service and experience, 45% for product innovation and design, 43% for marketing, 43% for productivity and research, 41% for software development, and 39% for network or equipment configuration and automation.
The report found that nineteen uses of AI have already shown positive ROI for telecommunications companies. The top ten are customer service and experience; security operations and hypersecurity; tech support; marketing; productivity and research; product innovation and design; network or equipment configuration and automation; finance and accounting; software development; and network remediation.
The top five AI impacts across business areas are in productivity (61%), customer experience (60%), business growth (53%), security (51%) and marketing (44%).
Respondents to the report said they see improved productivity (72%); faster “time to insight” (58%); better accuracy (55%); improvements in non-IT processes and staff productivity (55%); and faster time to market (44%).
Security is always important, of course. Fifty-one percent of respondents said that “gen” AI meaningfully impacted their organization’s security posture; 82% found improved ability to identify threats, 72% found improved intelligence and response integration; 58% experienced a reduction in time to resolution; and half had a reduction in the number of security tickets.
“Historically, agentic systems have been difficult to implement, requiring laborious, rule-based programming or highly specific training of machine learning models. Gen AI changes that,” said Google Cloud Global Head of Industry, Telecom Angelo Libertucci in the executive summary of the telecommunications AI report.
“In fact, over half of telecommunications executives report their organizations are already leveraging AI agents. The use cases span a spectrum of complexity — from single-task agents to multi-agent systems that can take actions on your behalf and under your control. And while this technology is already helping people get more done, many companies are still in the early phases of agentic maturity.”
A report released earlier this month by IFS also found AI is finding deep roots. If said that there is an “invisible revolution” in which the focus is morphing to “embedded, operational AI across core business processes” from productivity-led AI experimentation.
