VIEWPOINT

Globally, enterprises are managing businesses in a highly challenging world with increased volatility, uncertainty and complexity. As a result, enterprises need to leverage the latest technologies to enhance their capabilities to address the new-age market challenges.

In this regard, 5G, with its ability to provide ultra-high-speed and extremely low latency, is helping businesses unlock new capabilities to maximize the available market opportunities. However, since 5G is different from previous communications standards and enables several new and innovative use cases it demands, the service providers must transform their own operations and processes to be able to provide relevant 5G-powered use cases to enterprises.

This is all the more crucial as 5G allows telcos to offer new use cases to enterprises, thus opening new revenue streams for them. The 5G enterprise market size was valued at $1,682 million in 2020 and is projected to reach $16,846 Million by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 33.9% from 2021 to 2028, according to Valuates Research.

Transforming from CSP into a Cognitive Tech-co 

Thailand’s AIS, the country’s leading digital service provider, is moving away from being a traditional Communications Service Provider (CSP) and transforming itself into a Cognitive Tech-Co, so it is able to leverage technologies like data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide improved and truly differentiated service and solutions to its enterprise customers.

“This will help us to drive towards the mission that we want to achieve in terms of the way how we can accelerate the digital transformation for Thailand businesses,” says Tanapong Ittisakulchai, Chief Enterprise Business Officer at AIS, who recently attended The 2nd Business Executives Roundtable at the 13th Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF), and also joined Win Win Live in Bangkok for a dialogue on Thailand’s digital transformation.

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AIS is Thailand’s biggest service provider and was the first operator to launch 5G in 2020. Now it boasts of around 45 million subscribers, more than 70% of which are active data users. AIS’ 5G covers more than 80% of the country’s population.

AIS believes that 5G also allows it to contribute to the Government’s Thailand 4.0 vision, which was launched recently. The Thailand 4.0 policy is designed to promote and support innovation, creativity, research and development, higher technologies and green technologies.

“As a trusted, smart digital partner, serving Thai organizations to accelerate their digital transformation with a comprehensive suite of digital technology and delivering services with trusted professionals,” says Tanapong Ittisakulchai. The service provider is aiding the digital transformation of Thai enterprises in different verticals like manufacturing, healthcare and energy.

“Our key strategy is to focus on investment, you know, in the intelligence networks, building 5G ecosystem partners with the cloud convergence and AI. You know, we can provide a better data-driven business solution for the customers and more importantly, we partner and build a platform to focus on the vertical industries as well,” explains Tanapong Ittisakulchai.

In this context, the importance of collaboration in building an ecosystem can hardly be exaggerated. However, service providers typically work in silos. As a result, their processes are traditionally not designed to collaborate with other players. To address this problem, AIS is building a “partnership framework that integrates the technology side with the customers, which is more of a vertical solution requirement and then co-creates a sustainable business model.”

Further, AIS is also enabling the digital transformation experience of its enterprise customers by leveraging its own experience. It provides AIS with a unique perspective on the problems enterprises face in digitally transforming their operations.

“At the same time, we learn from the customers as well as about their vertical industries, their requirements, and their challenges, and co-create the solution which is more sustained and builds the proper sustainable solution for the future,” says Tanapong Ittisakulchai. This way, AIS is better able to address the changing requirement of enterprises.

AIS is at the forefront of transforming its operations and has set an example for other service providers to reimagine their processes to better serve the changing needs of the enterprise segment.