Mario Bautista
LIVE FROM M360 APAC, SEOUL: Samsung Networks president and GM Kim Woojune (pictured) suggested today’s infrastructure is not fit for a fast-moving world, insisting networks have to be more flexible, AI-friendly and run on common hardware and software.
“AI is a whole new game. Our industry needs to change things,” he said. Looking at networks, “we have different functions that are built on different hardware, having different handling systems, planned by different people”.
He cautioned that AI as a general purpose technology will take time to have a significant impact on productivity, similar to other disruptive technologies such as the steam engine, requiring fundamental changes across infrastructure, processes and organisations.
It took the steam engine, electrical power and computing 50 to 100 years to create sustained economic benefits, Kim stated. “But for these to happen, society, culture and people had to change.”
AI is starting to be used in call centres and for analytics, which he said is a good start. But fundamentally it is only used only as a tool, and simply introducing AI into the network won’t be a game-changer since today’s networks are non-flexible, single-purpose and hard to change.
Creating an AI-power telco infrastructure needs a uniform structure, software-based, multi-purpose and distributed edge platform, Kim said. “Our industry needs to reboot and come together.”
