Bill Tang, President, Global Technical Service, Huawei

[Abstract] In the "Service and Software Enable Business Success" session at Huawei's Better World Summit 2020, Bill Tang, President of Huawei Global Technical Service, delivered a keynote speech titled "AI Inside" Platform Enables Digital Transformation & Makes Operation Smarter. In the speech, he pointed out that the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 poses great challenges to carriers’ operations, accelerating their digital transformation. With Huawei's "AI inside" platform and professional services, we can help carriers transform their operations to be more intelligent and efficient, empowering them throughout their entire digital transformation journey.

2020 has been a very challenging year due to the global outbreak of COVID-19. Many industries and companies are facing challenges never seen before. Shops are closed, people are grounded, and face-to-face interactions are avoided. Health and safety become the top concern for people. During these difficult times, ICT infrastructure has provided strong support for fighting the pandemic. Carriers provide more digital services and solutions for users to support the explosive growth of online activities.

First, as face-to-face communication decreases, carriers can help enterprises interact with their customers through the intelligent customer care services. Second, with insight from big data analysis, carriers can recommend services that are more suitable for different customers. Third, intelligent network O&M and optimization can improve customer satisfaction and user experience. Finally, during the outbreak, automated delivery greatly improved deployment efficiency, ensuring safety for frontline staff.

Bill Tang, President, Global Technical Service, Huawei

Huawei's AI-empowered digital platform allows carriers to capture market opportunities through quicker respond to customers and network changes, making their network operations much easier and smarter. With the AI-inside platform and professional services, Huawei helps carriers carry out operation transformation and improve operation efficiency and intelligence, enabling them throughout their digital transformation journey. The digital platform makes operation more intelligent in the four scenarios.

AI + Convergence Customer Care Platform for Digital Intelligent Services

Constant customer engagement is crucial for enterprises, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak. Huawei's AI Contact Center (AICC) is a high-definition video-based, intelligent, and open platform. In collaboration with carriers, the AICC can provide different industry customers such as government, healthcare, insurance, Internet, and banking with a diverse range of intelligent, scenario-specific customer services.

First, HD video supports visual collaboration such as desk sharing and three-party collaboration when customers remotely engage with customer support personnel, delivering a service experience similar to face-to-face communication. For example, a customer can file and complete their tax forms remotely via a video agent in minutes, which used to take days.

Second, AI-empowered processing such as intelligent routing, voice and video conversation combination, and subtitles overlaying based on automatic speech recognition and natural language processing technologies, can significantly improve customers' interactive experience, increasing efficiency by up to 20%. Recently, a customer used the AICC to gather more than 70 medical experts around the world in order to provide online medical consulting services to their patients during the outbreak.

Last but least, the AICC is an all-in-one platform that can integrate with production systems and service processes of different enterprises, helping them serve their customers more efficiently. An example is that an auto insurance company can now allow their customers to report small incidents on mobile phones. Customers can also conduct online loss estimations and claim insurance payback after online approval. The whole process takes a few minutes.

AI + Business Intelligence Platform for Smart Operations

The pandemic has greatly changed people’s lives and work as company staff choose to work remotely and students have online classes at home. Therefore, traffic in CBD areas has seen a sharp decline while traffic in residential areas grows exponentially. Huawei's business intelligent platform can respond quickly to changes in user behavior and hotspot traffic patterns, ensuring normal business operations and service quality that are crucial to user experience.

Huawei's business intelligent platform can streamline marketing and network data and help build a unified data model. Using machine learning to analyze users’ potential interest in new service and product offerings, the platform can accurately identify potential business opportunities. With built-in policy templates, it can automatically generate recommended products and services tasks and push the tasks at a proper time and place to frontline personnel or marketing channels such as voice calls, SMS messages, WeChat, and Facebook etc.

By collecting different network data, user-level poor data experience, and poor-QoE home users and content users can be identified through big data analysis. Tasks will then be generated for frontline personnel or marketing channels, guiding them to show more care for users with poor experience.

AI + Integrated Operation & Optimization Platform for Intelligent O&M

By applying AI in network O&M, we can quickly optimize networks and resolve network faults, thereby enhancing user experience and customer satisfaction.

With more than 100 operation practices across the world, we have developed an intelligent operation platform that can use fault models to detect potential risks of home broadband, wireless hardware, and VoLTE faults in advance to reduce the number of faults and service interruptions for high network availability. Leveraging event models, fault diagnosis trees, and API control, the platform can quickly identify, diagnose, and rectify faults to reduce user complaints and site visits. The platform also has open APIs that allow operation engineers to create new operation apps to cater for various operation needs.

As traffic hotspots shift, power consumption of sites will increase in new hotspot areas. Based on Huawei's AI technology and data/voice modeling, customized energy optimization policies can be deployed for individual sites which may have different power requirements at different dates and times without compromising network KPIs.

Supported by more than 150 optimization algorithms, our optimization platform makes network planning and optimization more efficient for better network experiences. With key features including 4G/5G collaborative planning and optimization, indoor and outdoor user differentiation and AI-enabled platinum parameters, 5G planning accuracy can be improved by 10-20% and the deep coverage rate by 8%.

AI + Integrated Delivery Platform for Smart and Agile Network Deployment

Continually improving delivery quality and efficiency is also a key part of digital transformation. Our integrated service delivery platform (ISDP) can help to accelerate and automate delivery processes and operations, greatly improving operational efficiency. The ISDP has more than 100 applications and over 500 micro services spanning the entire delivery process. It has been applied in more than 5500 projects in 170 countries.

• Antenna azimuth and downtilt are critical to network planning and optimization, but obtaining accurate antenna position data can be difficult. A specialist engineer needs to climb up to the towers to measure the antenna using professional tools. Another engineer needs to keep alert on the ground to deal with any emergencies. Besides, additional errors might occur during data transfer. Now we only need to take a photo of the antenna on the ground, which is easily completed by one person. The tools will automatically generate antenna position data and upload it to the platform for network planning and optimization. This increases delivery efficiency and data accuracy, and avoid any environment, health, and safety (EHS) risks.
• In the past, drive tests to collect site quality data for tuning were both time- consuming and costly. With the integration delivery platform, drive tests are no longer needed since network data can be directly collected and automatically analyzed by the platform. As a result, the delivery quality and efficiency can be improved by more than 20%.
• With ISDP, remote delivery acceptance can now be achieved with e-report, e-signature and AI quality inspection. The delivery quality is fully checked without field inspection and the acceptance is completed without involving any papers and signatures.

Digital transformation is vital for the sustainable development of the telecom industry. It can be a long journey for many carriers. The ultimate goal of Huawei is to build a digital architecture that is open and easy to operate on, and that can help create an ecosystem containing partners from various vertical industries. To this end, we will continue to invest in and evolve our business and GDE. We will also assist carriers in their digital transformation, helping them deliver digital services more easily, optimize network and business performance more efficiently, and deploy and operate networks in a more agile way.