Huawei’s Operations and Transformation Forum Africa 2024 opened to an eager audience of industry insiders and a lineup of high-level experts at part of this year’s AfricaCom conference. The forum’s agenda focused on exploring ways for telecommunications industry stakeholders to use intelligent operations to unlock new business growth.

David Li, President of Huawei’s Southern Africa Delivery and Service Business gave a speech on the theme of All Intelligent Operations to Enable New Growth. David shared insights about how carriers must prepare for the intelligent era, emphasising the need to upgrade technologies, strategies, services, and operations and maintenance (O&M) modes. The AI era will reshape how operators monetise, deliver smooth user experiences, and O&M thus reshaping the telecoms industry. In this new era AI-enabled O&M (AI for Operations) and AI-oriented O&M (Operations for AI) will promote each other. This will help companies achieve the ultimate multi-modal interaction experiences, facilitate the rapid development of digital intelligence services, enable closed-loop business, and unlock comprehensive intelligent O&M.

At the forum Global carriers, vertical industry leaders, and industry partners shared case studies that reflected the challenges and opportunities they face in entering the intelligent era. Operators shared successful examples of how they are using novel O&M methods to boost infrastructure innovation, develop new business models using mobile money, and increase the quality of user’s experiences as well as O&M efficiency.

David Li, President, Huawei Southern Africa Delivery & Service Business

“The AI era has arrived. By bringing together AI for Operations and Operations for AI, we will reshape everything from modes of monetisation to user experiences as well as ways of doing O&M mode,” said Li.

The TM Forum’s Teresa Cottam shared why, “Intelligent operations are the key to a prosperous future”. As a Senior Contributing Analyst at this leading global association for digital businesses, she spoke about why operators are taking different paths to revenue growth and business diversification based on their research. TM Forum found that digital operations are evolving into intelligent operations -- a shift that is rapidly accelerating business innovation. She also emphasised how operators like MTN and Safaricom are reshaping best practices in Africa.

Safaricom’s Chief Technology Officer, Anthony Gacanja, took to the stage to explain how Safaricom achieves its strategic objectives. Its mission has evolved over time and now it’s full-stack digital transformation has allowed it to accelerate fintech and connection service growth.

“A few key digital tactics had to be prioritised to enable Safaricom to achieve its status as a purpose-led technology company. We first sought to deliver superior customer experience to set ourselves apart. Then our people focused on leveraging the company’s growth for new tech solutions. This is a pivotal shift as we focus on becoming a TechCo with operations powered by AI,” said Gacanja.

Simo Mkhize, Chief Commercial Officer of Telkom Consumer shared insights and lessons from his organisation’s ‘OneTelkom’ strategy. Telkom proactively initiates intelligent marketing data transformation on the market side. By planning its evolution objectives of automation, digitisation, and intelligence, Telkom streamlines information from sources such as its market, network, and social networking, to build a converged foundation for carrying diversified data. It realises precise user segmentation on the market side, flexible marketing design, and data support from marketing personnel, helping customer value management and marketing teams shift towards data-driven market strategies.

In his presentation, Calvin Govender, General Manager of ICT Enterprise and Digital Services at MTN South Africa said, “In order to build a second-to-none-experience network, we need to overcome challenges like invisible numerous alarms, resource rotation, and experience work orders. Full-stack end-to-end intelligent maintenance, optimization, and NSOC synergy will enable customer-centric experiences and allow us to build an automated and intelligent target network.”

"At Orange our focus goes beyond providing customers with a high-quality experience and meaningful solutions. We combine intelligent operations based on AI and environmentally friendly solutions such as green sites to enhance the resilience of our network while being responsible for our environmental and societal impact," said by Gobe Mbayi, Chief Technical Officer at Orange Botswana.

As Jorge Mendes, CEO of Cell C South Africa mentioned, the market is now made up of buyers and sellers of network capacity. As a result, Cell C is buying unused capacity on partner networks, allowing it to offer wide coverage, faster speed combined with the best prices and value.

Steven Luo, Vice President, Service and Software Solution & Marketing, Huawei

In closing Steven Luo, Vice President of Service and Software Solutions and Marketing at Huawei said, “We should fully utilise this data advantage to make the AI flywheel spin faster. Transforming the mode of production from “human + tools” to “human + copilot and AI Agent”, ushering a new era of value-driven Operations”. He pointed out that new technologies such as AI are developing at an unprecedented speed—signalling that the next decades will be defined as the era of intelligence. Through this all-intelligent approach enterprises can seize new AI entries, create new experiences, and achieve growth through converged data and industry knowledge.