Thailand AIS: Building New Digital Growth Engine towards Cognitive TechCo

-- To address its business challenges, AIS formulated a digital transformation strategy to evolve from a digital service provider to become a Cognitive TechCo. This included implementing a data-driven 5G development strategy to support the rapid introduction and adoption of 5G 2C and 2B services. In this article, Tanapong Ittisakulchai, Chief Enterprise Business Officer at AIS, will share the remarkable achievements of their digital transformation strategy in terms of O&M efficiency improvement, experience improvement, and revenue growth.

AIS Thailand is the No.1 operator in Thailand and the first to launch 5G in the country. With nearly 45 million subscribers, of which more than 70% are active data users, the AIS mobile network covers 98% of the country's population. We deliver advanced connectivity and a wide range of digital content and services powered by AIS' high-speed 4G and 5G networks. However, we realize the need to evolve further to address the dynamic requirements of the industry and drive our growth to the next level. With this goal, we are advancing from being a digital service provider to become a Cognitive Tech-Co.

During our transformation journey, we are leveraging advanced technologies like data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to build innovative cognitive platforms that enable high levels of automation and intuitive decision-making capabilities. This is chiefly driven by our aspiration to build better capabilities to understand customer requirements and thus create the best value from our offerings. Our mission also aligns with the Thailand 4.0 Strategy that places great focus on accelerating the digital transformation of Thailand's businesses. Through this transformation, AIS aims to emerge as a trusted smart digital partner for Thai organizations and businesses by offering a comprehensive suite of digital services built around modern technologies.

Challenges for AIS business, to be come a TechCo under VUCA

We are operating in a business environment filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) in both consumer and enterprise segments. Inflation and other economic uncertainties are greatly impacting present-day businesses, so they are looking for partners who can help them overcome the VUCA challenges. We, as a business, are also confronting the same challenges, so we have adopted an intelligent technology-driven approach that will help us navigate these challenges successfully while also delivering distinctive customer experience across mobile, fixed broadband, enterprise and digital services.

We are working on four strategies to help us pursue the TechCo journey in the VUCA period: Clear vision, agility & adaptability, data-driven and innovation. Firstly, we have set clear goals and benchmarks to pursue our vision which are communicated across our team. Secondly, we must have the ability to rapidly innovate and build new capabilities to address emerging requirements demanded by today's dynamic market environment. Thirdly, we are developing a data-centric approach that aligns with our mission and helps us build agile, customer-centric and intelligent business strategies that empower our people with better insights to support the needs of our customers. Finally, we are also striving to build zero-touch operations to automate our processes and improve efficiency.

AIS digital transformation achievements: experience-driven and zero-touch operations

AIS' customer experience-focused digital transformation journey has delivered significant improvements to our processes and created tangible business value.

Our agile O&M has contributed to great improvements in operation efficiency measured by First Call Resolution (FCR), First Time Resolution (FTR) and Average Handle Time (AHT). In fact, during the first year of our transition, FCR improved by 15 percent while AHT reduced by 25%. There was also significant improvement in FTR, growing from 47% to 63%.

Our experience-driven operations now proactively identify and help customers suffering poor experience, leading to great improvements in customer satisfaction. As a result, our churn rate has reduced by 18%, and with VIP Proactive Care, VIP complaints have reduced by 14%. Furthermore, with an effective data monetization strategy built around pillars like AIS Play, Zeed 5G, AIS 5G Insurance and VGI Advertisement, AIS has achieved several millions growth in data monetization revenue.

AIS' journey towards achieving zero-touch operations is highly ambitious. During 2018-20 when we shifted from manual to automated operations, we implemented over 1000 automated rules, which increased the Front Office (FO) efficiency by 25%. During 2021-22, when we moved from alarm-oriented processes to service-oriented operations, we further reduced revenue loss and increased FO efficiency by a further 10%. Now, as we move onwards to introduce fully zero-touch operations, we aim to improve end-to-end fault handling automation to over 95%, mainly driven by AI-enabled alarm analytics and risk prediction capabilities. In a nutshell, our intelligent O&M transformation builds on three capabilities: Platform evolution, process optimization, and organization & talent transformation. At the core of this evolution is Huawei SmartCare that provides us with a unified data platform bridging data silos and driving digital O&M capabilities. Process optimization is achieved through man-machine collaboration largely in automatic root cause identification and service impact analysis. Organization & talent transformation is achieved with the following three smart strategies:

• FO skills integration: Skills are combined in two groups. The separate MBB, fixed access and Tx teams have been combined into one team, while the Core, IG, IR and IP Core have been combined into a second team.
• NOC+SOC Synergy: Complaint handling is achieved through network element (NE) problem demarcation, and incident handling is achieved through service impact analysis.
• New DevOps Roles: New roles such as Network Strategist, Data Analyst and Application Orchestrator have been created to support our evolution.

AIS Digital Transformation plan, consumers' digital life and enterprises' digital platform

AIS' future plans revolve around enabling a digital lifestyle for consumers, focusing on enterprise or '2B' solutions, and providing digital platforms for enterprises/ businesses in Thailand.

5G for consumers: We are evolving to become the best digital experience enabler for consumers by advancing connectivity and leveraging the metaverse to unlock the future of augmented reality, immersive experiences, gaming and entertainment. V-Avenue.Co from AIS was the world's first virtual store where leading shopping malls and SMEs can showcase and offer their products through VR on Thailand's best and most advanced AIS 5G network, allowing customers to enjoy their shopping anytime, from anywhere—just like they are taking a walk at a shopping mall.

5G for 2B customers: We are enabling digital transformation across a wide range of industries like smart manufacturing, retail, real estate, transport & logistics, agriculture and more. Built on the latest capabilities in cloud, IoT, analytics, and security, these solutions significantly contribute to opex and capex optimization. Here are some examples:

• In smart automation we have used the latest technologies like 3D vision-robotic ARM, AS/RS warehouse, and unmanned AGVs to improve space utilization by 60% and reduce opex by 30%.
• Our omnichannel retail solution delivers a mashup of digital and physical experiences by leveraging AIS V-Avenue.
• In healthcare, our AIS Smart Health solutions enable healthcare providers to build a one-stop ICT and digital platform to support their remote healthcare services requirements. In transportation and logistics, we extensively leverage IoT to enable innovative types of insurance services based on real usage.
• For the agriculture sector, a combination of IoT, analytics and cloud-based applications enable smart farm solutions that can increase productivity by 20% while reducing resource usage by 30%.

2B solutions are emerging as a major component in our services revenue. In addition, we have also built a data monetization model covering several areas like location insights, customer insights, market & competition analysis and target audience selection. Location insight use cases include branch & store analysis, in-mall footfall analysis, new store discovery, public billboard audience measurement, and population density & drift. Customer insight data can be used to measure customer mobility, including commute & transportation, customer segmentation and customer journey analysis. Another major area is market & competition analysis that delivers insights for market share analysis, competitor & customer behaviour analysis, trend & journey analysis and associated correlation analysis. Lastly, with target audience data, we provide businesses with over 150 attributes for audience profiling. This anonymised data can also be used for persona development and to prepare audience lookalikes.

Convergent data drives 5G development

AIS' data strategy is proving vital across all areas of 5G development, including investment, acquisition and marketing. 'Intelligence' has emerged as the common factor in each strategy. A Business Intelligence (BI-based) smart investment strategy is applied in network selection and construction. Rule-based algorithms help identify high-value areas where the most profitable sites can be constructed, thereby improving revenue per site by 20%. Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is extensively applied in customer acquisition, identifies different behaviours through model training which can then be applied in subscriber growth strategies. With our AI-based customer acquisition strategy, we have achieved a sharp rise in our 5G customer base from 1 million to 4 million, and this is still growing. Data Intelligence (DI) applied across marketing has greatly helped in improving high value package conversion rate. By applying intelligence across people, place, product and experience, next best actions can be automatically generated to maximise customer adoption of offers. This DI strategy has brought significant growth, leading to an increase of 10-15%, in our 5G ARPU.

All of these examples show that data integration and intelligence is pivotal in the digital transformation journey of both telcos and their enterprise customers. The 5G evolution has just started, and we still have a long way to go. However, we feel that a roadmap built on data and intelligence will continue delivering value even as the 5G landscape grows bigger and more complex.