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Highlights
- Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telecom operator in India, has deployed a small language artificial intelligence (AI) model to help the field engineers.
- This is breakthrough for the engineering team of Airtel, the MD and CEO said.
- Airtel said that its 30,000 field engineers are now using this small language AI model.
Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
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Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks
Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telecom operator in India, has deployed a small language artificial intelligence (AI) model to help the field engineers. This is breakthrough for the engineering team of Airtel, the MD and CEO said. Airtel said that its 30,000 field engineers are now using this small language AI model. This is for various applications and it has led to significant cost savings.
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At the Q1 FY27 earnings call, Airtel MD and CEO, Shashwat Sharma, said, “this quarter, we were able to make a meaningful difference in our workmanship across 30,000 field engineers with the help of AI. We are putting a small language model, that works on the engineer’s endpoint device, which is a regular handset.”
He mentioned that, “this is a breakthrough for the engineering team, which we are using in-house.” Bharti Airtel confirmed that it is a patented technology that allows inference on the endpoint device instead of the cloud. This allows the device to process image in real time.
“This is leading to a step change in the quality of installs and fault repair and enforcing adherence to safety measures on the ground,” the CEO said. Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel, said, “We were spending, let’s say Rs 30-45 crore, on these workloads on the cloud. Now that it is being done on the device, the cost has gone down to zero.”
This improves profitability for the telecom operator, and allows the end users to get a better experience. Bharti Airtel is using AI to boost the productivity for in-house team and that has resulted in savings for the company. Bharti Airtel reported a net profit of more than Rs 8,000 crore in Q1 FY27. The telecom operator also reported a higher average revenue per user (ARPU) of Rs 264. Keep reading TelecomTalk to stay updated about the developments.
