PREDICTIVE TELECOM Competing and succeeding in the era …...1 “Digital Transformation Initiative, Telecommunications Industry,” World Economic Forum and Accenture, January 2017

P R E D I C T I V E T E L E C O MCompeting and succeeding in the era of digital transformation

2 | Rocket Fuel Institute | Predictive Telecom

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Fourth Industrial Revolution ........................................................................................................................................................................ 3

A Roadmap for the Predictive Future ...............................................................................................................................................................6

Building an Enterprise Learning System .........................................................................................................................................................9

Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................11

Five Strategic Imperatives for Predictive Telecom ..................................................................................................................................... 12

The combinatorial effect of new technologies—mobile,1 artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, and others—is resulting in a seismic digital transformation that is sweeping across all industries. In banking, organizations are connecting information across product lines to discover new intelligence on how to better serve customers. Automotive OEMs are ushering in the era of the connected car and autonomous technology driven by sensor data. Beacons and smartphones in retail are enabling retailers to interact with shoppers in a more dynamic fashion that converges the worlds of physical and online retail.

The telecommunications industry is in a unique position to capitalize on this digital transformation. As in other industries, telecom companies are seeing sweeping changes in how they interact with customers, who they are competing with, and the amount of data being generated by people and their devices. However, unlike other industries, telecom companies are positioned to enable this change as the owners of the massive infrastructure on top of which these advances are taking place. Innovations in the telecom industry in turn affect the digitization of the rest of the world. Telecom doesn’t simply use the infrastructure that facilitates digital transformation—it is the engine driving digital transformation and the proliferation of hardware and software. According to the World Economic Forum, the global flow of goods, services, and finance could triple from

1 “Digital Transformation Initiative, Telecommunications Industry,” World Economic Forum and Accenture, January 2017

$26 trillion in 2012 to more than $80 trillion in 2025.2 Global broadband speeds are increasing by 20 percent per year. According to Gartner, there will be 21 billion devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020.3

In addition to the current proliferation of data and devices, the advent of the 5G standard will usher in even more heightened connectivity, with enhanced mobile broadband, new classes of advanced application, and a more managed wide-area communications system to support a Massive Internet of Things (MIoT) that can support everything from autonomous connected cars to mission-critical applications such as smart grid technology and emergency systems. This level of connectivity and increased urbanism will happen on a massive scale that drives change through which new consumer use cases and business models will emerge. More connections mean more streamlined data, which will mean more complexity. However, this complexity opens the door to more insight. Currently, “We are data rich, but we are not insights rich,” says a former Motorola executive.4 We are embarking on an era where there is an opportunity for both data capture and data augmentation for value. Telecoms are front and center to help create new levels of personalization and intelligence sharing.

2 World Economic Forum and Accenture, 2017

3 “Gartner: 21 billion IoT devices to invade by 2020,” Information Week, November 2015

4 Rocket Fuel internal research


“The ever wider availability of technologies such as mobile, artificial intelligence,

cloud, analytics, and platforms [is] dramatically altering the way we live, work, and

interact—in what has been termed the fourth industrial revolution.”—World Economic Forum1

Customers expect no less. Even today they demand the same high levels of service and immediate response from telecom companies that they get in other industries. Customers have come to expect what Accenture and Fjord call “liquid experiences,”5 in which any specific customer need is now made available through a stream of interconnected intermediaries. According to the paper, “Businesses have a choice: either reshape the way they deliver their services or products, or continue to see the control of every aspect of the customer experience slip from their grasp.”6

Telecoms have the opportunity to build the pipelines that can anticipate customer needs and provide the exceptional experiences and instant gratification that are now the status quo. But this will require two things: for companies to know their customers as individuals, and for them to extend and deliver their services over multiple touchpoints to meet customer needs according to constantly changing

5 “The Era of Living Services,” Accenture and Fjord, 2015

6 Accenture and Fjord, 2015

context.7 The best examples of this capability would also inject elements of surprise and delight, from downloading a playlist of your favorite band to your smartphone or connected car as you travel to their concert, to spontaneous recommendations from your personal digital assistant of things to do for visiting guests based on what’s on their smartphones.8 Accomplishing both of these things requires telecoms to take a predictive approach to customer needs, to both identify these individual desires and meet them with exceptional experiences—something that has been a challenge to date for large, legacy telecom companies.

Despite telecom’s opportunity to be at the forefront of digital transformation, creating massive new value for other industries, telecom operators themselves are seeing their slice of the profit pie shrink. In 2010, telecom operators owned 58 percent of industry profits. That number was down to 47 percent in 2015 and is projected to go down still more by 2018, to 45 percent profit share.9





Semiconductor Network Equipment

Wireline & Wireless Operators

Content Distribution (cable & satellite)

Content Creators / AggregatorsDevice Manufacturers

13.3%

24.4%

34.9%33.2%

14.4%

32.8%

15.1%

32.3%33.0% 30.2%26.6%

18.0%

500 1,500 2,500 3,5001,000 3,0002,000 4,000

32.8%

16.7%

35.4%

18.3%

33.5%34.5%

Revenue ($ billion) 0

58% of industry profits



2010

2015

2018

EBIT

DA

(%)

EBIT

DA

(%)

EBIT

DA

(%)

WIRELESS & WIRELINE OPERATORS ACCOUNT FOR A SHRINKING PORTION OF THE TELECOM PROFIT POOL

Source: World Economic Forum/Accenture analysis based on data from S&P Capital IQ


There are a number of factors that contribute to the shrinking share of profits. Digital content creation companies have seen large increases in profits over the past decade. Google, Facebook, Netflix, and others have achieved scale by leveraging the global penetration of the Internet to deliver unique services and experiences to consumers.10 Device manufacturers also captured a larger share of profit with groundbreaking product and design innovations that take advantage of 4G’s ability to deliver more data and services to consumers via smartphones.11

How do telecom companies create future value to regain profit share? The answer lies in shifting the business model away from just providing bandwidth to providing something significantly more. Telecoms have a huge opportunity in the next decade to not only create the bandwidth for other players to come in and offer goods and services on top of the pipe, but to also begin offering their own goods and services to customers. Telecoms stand poised to offer everything from content to ecommerce to services such as online banking and travel booking, much like technology platforms such as Google have already begun to do.

But for telecoms to do so, they must be able to analyze the customer data flowing through the pipes to determine which goods and services people would be willing to buy. There exists an astronomical amount of proprietary device data



and granular metadata that telecom companies can capture at the user level. In 2013, it was noted that 90 percent of the world’s data had been created within the previous two years,12 and data creation certainly hasn’t slowed down since. As connectivity and bandwidth grow exponentially, that data will continue to compound. Data is of an order of magnitude that no human mind alone can harness and analyze its content, let alone in real time. However, most companies haven’t fully embraced technology, such as artificial intelligence, that can keep pace in structuring that data.

Companies will need to leverage predictive platforms based on artificial intelligence that can help them create personas and audience archetypes. From there, telecoms themselves can use that data to create new lines of business and new platforms, and begin to accelerate their own innovation, rather than just being the conduit for others. First, they must be able to observe customers’ behavior and transactional moments to know how to better market to them, meet their needs, and offer exceptional experiences. Telecoms must also move from transactions to interactions to provide these experiences for customers.

12 “Big Data, for better or worse: 90% of world’s data generated over last two years,” Science Daily, May 22, 2013

In the telecommunications industry, there are three distinct macro themes that will define industry growth and transformation in the next decade:

• Software and the virtualization of networks—more data, more customers, more time and money to invest in services

• Moving up the technology stack—goods and services and the Internet of Things

• Innovating new ways to work—a new approach to the workforce and research and development

From a reinvention of the way telecom companies provision bandwidth for customers to a reinvention of their fundamental makeup and way of doing business, these big changes will pave the way for an environment in which predictive technologies have more data, visibility, and agility to determine customer needs and help companies capture share of both mind and wallet. Telecoms that are cognizant of both the pipes they build and the data they collect will have a significant competitive advantage. A predictive enterprise learning system can help create that advantage for years to come.

SOFTWARE AND THE VIRTUALIZATION OF NETWORKS—MORE DATA, MORE CUSTOMERS, MORE MONEY AND TIME TO INVEST IN SERVICESWatch any commercial for a communications service provider (CSP) such as Verizon or AT&T, and the network is the differentiator. More coverage, fewer dropped calls, better reception. Each claims to be more adept than its competitors at providing the most and best coverage for customers. Starting now, that no longer matters.

Physical infrastructure no longer drives differentiation for CSPs. For the telecom industry, infrastructure is fast reaching a Moore’s Law tipping point—more of it produces increasingly diminishing returns for telecoms, and soon it will no longer be able to keep up with demand. Advances in digital and cloud capabilities mean that value now lies more in generic, commoditized equipment and more flexible, autonomous, customized networks for a variety of use cases.13

In the next 10 years, the telecom industry will see a shift toward software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). SDN separates the control and data layers of the network, and NFV replaces complex network functions with virtualized software that is easier to manipulate. Companies will be able to provision more bandwidth, faster, and the World Economic Forum estimates that SDN and NFV combined will generate savings of 25 to

13 World Economic Forum and Accenture

A ROADMAP FOR THE PREDICTIVE FUTURE



75 percent of overall operating expenditures for telecoms, with significantly reduced provisioning, monitoring, and hardware costs.14

SDN and NFV will give telecom operators the ability to view and manipulate network functions on demand, which opens up possibilities to predict and anticipate customer network needs. Operators will be able to enable real-time provisioning and service, eventually automating these functions. This automation of provisioning and incident handling will enable operators to dynamically keep up with demand for bandwidth and the exploding number of incident reports that will naturally occur with more people over more bandwidth.

MORE BANDWIDTH = MORE CUSTOMERS = MORE DATA

One major effect of faster provisioning of bandwidth is more customers. More people are coming online, especially in emerging markets, where providers are now experimenting with technologies such as limited fiber networks and balloon or satellite connectivity. They bring with them more transactional moments and more data that telecoms can leverage to gauge what kind of services to provide over the next decade—that either they can provide or partner to provide. As IHS points out in a 2017 paper, “Mobile technology is often cited as playing a basic yet essential


role in connecting remote citizens in emerging economies to vital services, such as the rise of mobile banking in Nigeria.”15 In emerging economies, people in small, remote villages with minimal impact on the economy can now have access to college educations and global markets. Telecoms can benefit from this trend by enabling broader platforms that anyone can access, in exchange for data. That data in turn can enhance customer experiences, gather new intelligence, and create new opportunities for products and applications.

Automated software provisioning and response to issues will have other long-range benefits as well. Lower operating costs could mean that customers will see cost savings passed down to them, even with faster networks and better reception. With improved service and the ability to predictively spot and fix issues, CSPs could see a reduction in customer churn caused by connectivity issues. Larger and more consistently responsive networks could also contribute to a spike in consumer productivity—the World Economic Forum reports that customers could see an estimated 2.5 billion hours in total time savings from fewer dropped calls by 2025, translating to productivity gains of up to $3.8 billion.16

MOVING UP THE TECHNOLOGY STACK—GOODS AND SERVICES AND THE IOTWith the move toward virtualization freeing money and time, telecoms can turn attention toward the services layer of the technology stack. The larger customer base that will come with the expansion of bandwidth through virtualization, ownership of this infrastructure, and the technical capabilities and size of telecom operations put telecoms in an excellent position to become digital services providers for their consumers. According to the World Economic Forum, almost a quarter of companies say that they expect digital services across consumer and enterprise to account for more than 25 percent of total revenues by 2020.17

The shift from pipeline provider to service provider is already happening with some companies. Orange, the largest telecom provider in France, is currently building out

15 “The 5G economy: How 5G technology will contribute to the global economy,” IHS, January 2017




new digital revenue streams in mobile banking.18 In April 2016, the carrier acquired a 65 percent stake in French insurer Groupama’s banking unit to set up the mobile-only “Orange bank.”19 Telefonica in Spain is using big data assets to analyze movement patterns of millions of its subscribers. The data can be used to provide insights in various regions—for example enabling Telefonica to tailor public transportation and retail applications based on consumer patterns.20

As with Telefonica, predictive data platforms will help telecom operators gauge where customers want and need services based on their moment-to-moment transactions. Companies can leverage this data to build out the digital services customers want and increase their economic value in the coming decade, as well as compete more closely with platform companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft who are starting from a base of digital services and making inroads into telecom.

THE RISE OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS

With the implementation of the 5G network in the next few years comes more managed communications to handle both lower frequency devices and high-frequency, mission-critical systems with no interruption to regular telecommunications service. The advent of this increased, more sophisticated bandwidth will see the Internet of Things proliferate in earnest, and along with it an opportunity for telecom providers to own another significant share of the market. The industrial IoT alone is forecast to add $14 trillion of economic value to the global economy by 2030.21 Experts





anticipate more than 50 billion legacy sensors linked to a common network in the next decade.22 Consumer IoT services in health and fitness, home security, the automotive industry, home automation, and more are expected to explode.

Smart telecom operators are realizing that while they can provide the connectivity hub for these devices, sensors, platforms, and people, they also have an opportunity to develop the platforms, applications, integration, and analytics capabilities that will be critical to unlocking the power of the IoT. Companies will need to build entirely new capabilities and offerings to compete against other major technology companies in the space, as well as startups. The players that are already making moves in this space are covering a spectrum of services. The Intel IoT Platform provides device connectivity, cloud hosting, and analytics support. Apple and Samsung are developing integrated home IoT suites providing interoperability and connectivity

between devices.23 These cross-functional platforms will be what is necessary to compete in the market for the Internet of Things.

Again, managing these devices and their platforms will take more computing power than human capacity can control. The same artificial intelligence that helps networks self-optimize in real time is also critical to the success of the IoT, both in serving the users of these devices and in helping networks optimize for both high- and low-demand devices. The sensors and devices themselves will provide more data that can be leveraged in a predictive platform to determine how, where, and when to best serve customers.




Identity management and analytics

Companies need platforms that append individual interactions at the touchpoint level, but that can also map these interactions to devices, households, and actual people. These connections can provide insights on who people are and what they are likely to do next.

Predictive modeling pipelines

The right predictive modeling platform can create a suite of potential models through device metadata. These models can predict anything from utilization to power outages, purchase behaviors, media consumption habits, and more.

Journey management tools

Applications that can ingest the modeled data can reveal inherent patterns that deepen engagement and allow brands to influence behaviors through liquid experiences. With this capability, telecoms can be conduits that feed their own data pipeline.

Autonomous data capture, structuring, and enrichment applications

Developing rich insights as well as rich data requires proprietary applications that leverage the latest advances in natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning to automate the data “tagging” process so data doesn’t go dark the moment you capture it.

Decision systems

The final piece of the puzzle involves intelligent applications that allow users to autonomously optimize supply and demand, create insights on the fly, and drive exponential efficiencies through informed recursive learning features.

AUGMENTED REALITY AND VIRTUAL REALITY

The emerging technologies of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are seen by some as the next major innovation on the horizon. According to Goldman Sachs, AR and VR may emerge to be “as game-changing as the advent of the PC.”24 Both represent an opportunity for telecom companies to invest in still relatively nascent technology. Many technology platforms are beginning to make plays in the AR and VR space, but telecoms can capitalize on the need for additional connectivity services and bandwidth.

24 “The real deal with virtual and augmented reality,” Goldman Sachs, February 2016

AT THE INTERSECTION OF DATA AND SERVICES

With all of these technologies, telecom companies have the distinct benefit of being at the intersection of data and services. With access to data from sensors and devices, they can provide bidirectional communication by creating platforms and applications that leverage customer data—across traditional services, the IoT, and eventually VR and AR. In all of these areas, telecom operators will have access to trillions of data points within consumer applications, services, and devices that, when combined with the right data and decision making platform, can yield unprecedented insight into customer behavior and needs. This insight can give telecom operators the upper hand in determining the new services that people want and need, and can help telecoms make people’s experiences more meaningful within those services.

BUILDING AN ENTERPRISE LEARNING SYSTEM

THE FIVE MOST LUCRATIVE INVESTMENTS TELECOMS CAN MAKE TO CAPITALIZE ON THE INTERNET OF THINGS

10| Rocket Fuel Institute | Predictive Telecom

INNOVATING NEW WAYS TO WORK—A NEW APPROACH TO THE WORKFORCE AND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENTFor decades, the status quo has been that of telecom companies in their walled gardens, each defending its own slice of connectivity. The telecommunications industry has traditionally been internally focused, with a very insular environment for research and development and an outlook that is more fixed on sales and marketing. The World Economic Forum found that for a typical communications service provider, 45 percent of job postings are for sales and marketing positions, 12 percent in engineering and IT. Compare that with Silicon Valley, where the figures are nearly reversed: 51 percent of jobs are in engineering and IT, as opposed to 13 percent in sales and marketing.25

To truly innovate and take advantage of the opportunities that will come with more pipeline and more customer data, CSPs need to make some changes, taking down walls and opening up pathways to research and development. As companies in other industries in Silicon Valley and beyond have done, telecom operations need to invest in external research and development, open-innovation projects, and corporate venture projects. Outside investment will widen the pool of information and ideas. In addition, smaller companies and independent projects within an organization are more agile and work faster, unencumbered by internal processes and rules. For example, Telefonica entered into a strategic partnership in 2015 with Coral Group, a venture capital firm that invests in innovative startups to help support its online innovation platform, Telefonica Open Future.26 Likewise, telecoms can rely on external platforms that use artificial intelligence and other technologies to analyze data and gain insights on consumer behavior.

The continued growth of ecosystem connectivity and bidirectional semantic transformation will enable an explosion of innovative solutions that will help drive brands toward ubiquity and improve lives. Through investment in open research and development, telecoms sit poised to drive this innovation and radically transform their own brands for the good of their customers.



FREE-FLOWING DATA

As infrastructure grows and changes, and software and the cloud become more intrinsic to telecommunications access, it’s becoming more clear that the days of restricted data networks are coming to a close. For ideas and innovation to flow freely, data also needs to be free-flowing, not in networks that are developing in parallel or in competition. Systems will be cheaper, faster, and more flexible with technologies such as fiber and 5G bringing connectivity to more people around the world. In early 2017, Facebook announced two different collaborations with telecom companies in Uganda to lay about 480 miles of fiber in the region, with the idea of sharing the fiber with any interested telco. An estimated 3 million new users would come online under this project.27 Whether the solution is more expensive fiber or another method of getting wireless connectivity to emerging nations around the world, Facebook is betting that sharing, not walling off infrastructure, is the way of the future.

With one big network for everyone, data can be free as air, flowing from one place to the next. Technologies such as artificial intelligence are the electricity that keeps it all moving, gathering and modeling data that flows between platforms and service providers, analyzing and optimizing customer service in a recursive way. In fact, Andrew Ng, head of AI at Baidu, referred to AI as “the new electricity” in a 2017 talk, saying that AI will have the same impact on life and technology as electricity did more than 100 years ago.28 Ng said that after some rocky beginnings, AI is now coming into its own. “AI has passed winter and is now in an eternal spring,” Ng said, where it will be impacting business and become a factor in technology development for many years to come.29 With walls down and data flowing freely through systems, it will become more crucial than ever for telecom service providers to stop thinking about infrastructure and start thinking about how to develop services and applications on top of this open data pipeline.

27 “Facebook to Telcos: Forget Hardware Empires—Let’s All Share,” Wired, February 28, 2017

28 “Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity,” Andrew Ng, Stanford Graduate School of Business Future Forum, January 25, 2017

29 Andrew Ng, 2017


Digital transformation is taking place all around us, and the telecommunications industry needs to transform with us. It won’t be an overnight metamorphosis, but telecoms that start making changes now to move toward a more open and predictive environment will find themselves in position to compete with countless technology companies and startups who will be building applications, services, and even connectivity in their space. There are several concrete steps that companies can begin to take now to help them succeed in the next decade.

LEAVE LEGACY BEHINDThe time for insular thinking and closed organizations has long passed in this new world of information freedom. To stay innovative, service providers need to look beyond the walls of their organizations and bring outside ideas in. Invest in outside partnerships and startups that will bring new life and ideas into the organization. Within the organization, develop pockets of innovative work and thinking that operate outside of ordinary, rigid business processes and definitions. Do so, and traditionally limited and heavily regulated companies will begin to innovate the services they offer to their customers.

TAKE THE FINANCIAL LEAPReinventing an entire business model that has been in place for decades does not come cheap. It will require a large investment that won’t be immediately attractive to shareholders interested in short-term gain and those primarily concerned with the bottom line. However, transformation can’t happen without a full commitment—culturally and financially—to a new way of thinking and doing things.

For example, Comcast unveiled its new X1 platform, which transformed the provider from a traditional cable television model to a full digital experience, with a cloud-based platform that enabled content delivery to users anywhere, anytime, across devices. However, to do so, Comcast had to

transition millions of subscribers to the new platform, reskill workers, reorient systems, and revamp customer service. It’s estimated that Comcast invested $300 million in this radical transformation.30 The company took the leap and revamped and revitalized its content delivery capabilities.

KEEP UP WITH THE PACE OF DATATo keep pace with data as it is created, telecom companies need to invest in data integration and activation platforms. This allows opportunities to partner with companies that have unique proprietary databases, such as marketing observations that will enable unique audience insights that inform what solutions to provide in the future. Telecoms that once held high restrictions for sharing data across the board and that once worked in silos can benefit from more advanced AI-powered tools that work with dynamically changing data sets that get better over time. This has many applications and use cases both for the individual people they serve and the businesses that want to build solutions on top of the infrastructure being evolved.

FAIL FAST AND OFTENTrillions of new customer data points, combined with an AI-powered platform that is constantly modeling, analyzing, and optimizing intelligence in real time provides the ultimate testing ground for new services. Don’t be afraid to try and fail. Instead of gambling on one giant initiative, make small bets across your platform that you can revise and refine—or reject—quickly as you gain a greater knowledge of what your customers want.

By taking some calculated risks and thinking predictively about what customers want and need during this fourth industrial revolution, telecom companies can position themselves to lead in innovation and in the market in the next decade and beyond.


CONCLUSION

FIVE STRATEGIC IMPERATIVES FOR PREDICTIVE TELECOM


PEOPLE NOT DEVICESPredictive organizations are customer-centric, not product- or device-centric. All transactions and devices tie back to a universal ID of a single person or household.

MOMENTS NOT SEGMENTS Traditional marketing segments are rooted in historical data. Predictive businesses build models that include transactional moments for real-time accuracy and the power to anticipate and exceed customer expectations.

OWNED NOT RENTEDFirst-party data is a predictive organization’s biggest asset. The best decisions and innovations come when truly leveraging this proprietary data.

JOURNEY NOT FUNNELPredictive businesses know that a sale or conversion isn’t the final transaction. The customer’s journey never ends, and the path to conversion is often nonlinear. Businesses that can anticipate future actions are the ones that will succeed.

DECISIONS NOT DATAFor the past decade, data management platforms have been hubs for data centralization, normalization, syndication, and analysis. Today, data management platforms must evolve into decision management platforms, exchanging models, with syndicated intelligence replacing syndicated data. In other words, one system’s AI talking to another system’s AI.

ABOUT ROCKET FUEL INSTITUTE

The Rocket Fuel Institute is a research initiative dedicated to the transformative

field of artificial intelligence in digital marketing. The RFI aims to transform

the digital industry, propelling it to the forefront of the global shift to artificial

intelligence (“AI”) by exploring innovation at the intersection of data, technology,

and customer experiences. We seek ways to enable and sustain AI-based growth

in marketing and across verticals by understanding how digital transformation and

adaptive automation combined with human intuition accelerates over time. Our

long term research goal is to converge academic research with applied sciences in

machine intelligence to understand the nature of brand experiences. For inquiries

into our existing or forthcoming work, or to discuss how you might partner with us,

please reach out to:

Nikos Acuña

Head of Rocket Fuel Institute

[email protected]

www.rocketfuel.com

ABOUT THE PREDICTIVE VERTICAL SERIES

The Predictive Vertical series explores the way marketers in respective industry

categories can gain a significant competitive advantage with best of breed

solutions. The series covers in-depth macro trends that are shaping the global

economy, defining the fate of companies and careers, while providing a sweeping

perspective on the most advanced tools that are changing the way brands interact

with audiences, and the way businesses achieve actionable insights to make more

informed decisions in finance, CPG, retail, healthcare, and travel.

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PREDICTIVE TELECOM Competing and succeeding in the era …...1 “Digital Transformation Initiative, Telecommunications Industry,” World Economic Forum and Accenture, January 2017