Google Cloud and Vodafone have collaborated to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to enable the next generation of AI use cases, including optimizing customer experiences, customer loyalty, and product recommendations.
That ‘AI Booster’ platform has been in development for 18 months, in a project led by Vodafone’s global big data and AI business as part of Vodafone Commercial, to embed more artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) technologies into the company’s overall operations.
Underpinned by Google’s Vertex AI, Vodafone’s AI Booster is a fully managed cloud-native platform that integrates with Vodafone’s Neuron platform, a data ocean built on Google Cloud.
The platform is credited with cutting the time it takes Vodafone’s data scientists and developers to get products and services from proof of concept to product from five months to as little as four weeks, representing an 80 percent reduction.
Cornelia Schaurecker, global group director for big data & AI at Vodafone, said: “To maximize business value at pace and scale, our vision was to enable fast creation and horizontal / vertical scaling of use cases in an automated, standardized manner. To do this, 18 months ago we set out to build a next-generation AI / ML platform based on new Google technology, some of which hadn’t even been announced yet.
“Today, we’re really proud that AI Booster is truly taking off, and went live in almost double the markets we had originally planned. Together, we’ve used the best possible ML Ops tools and created Vodafone’s ‘AI Booster Platform’ to make data scientists’ lives easier, maximise value and take co-creation and scaling of use cases globally to another level.”
Cengiz Ucbenli, global head of big data and AI, innovation and governance at Vodafone, added: “Vodafone’s flourishing relationship with Google Cloud is a vital aspect of our evolution toward becoming a world-leading tech communications company. It accelerates our ability to create faster, more scalable solutions to business challenges like improving customer loyalty and enhancing customer experience, whilst keeping Vodafone at the forefront of AI and data science.”
