AT&T is leveraging Nvidia’s artificial intelligence expertise throughout its operations.
Telecommunications providers handle enormous volumes of data. On a typical day, AT&T processes roughly 590 PB of information — the equivalent of about 6.5 million 4K movies — and turning that mass of data into actionable insights is a significant challenge.
To address this, AT&T is adopting Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software suite to improve its data processing and accelerate production AI workloads. The cloud-native solution includes more than 50 frameworks designed to simplify the development and deployment of enterprise AI.
Nvidia notes that AT&T is the first telecommunications company to pursue a full implementation of the company’s AI offerings.
“We strive each day to deliver the most efficient global network, as we drive towards net zero emissions in our operations,” said Andy Markus, Chief Data Officer at AT&T. “Working with NVIDIA to drive AI solutions across our business will help enhance experiences for both our employees and customers.”
AT&T has committed to becoming carbon-neutral by 2035, a demanding target to meet while maintaining a high-performance network.
The first Nvidia solution AT&T adopted was the RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark, which enables the company to use energy-efficient GPUs across AI and data science pipelines. That accelerator helps improve operational efficiency across tasks such as training AI models, maintaining network quality, reducing customer churn, and improving fraud detection.
AT&T reports that targeting data and AI pipelines with the accelerator has resulted in about a 50 percent reduction in cloud computing costs for those workloads.
In addition, AT&T is using Nvidia’s cuOpt for real-time vehicle routing and optimization. Routing problems require massive computation to account for variables such as traffic, weather, customer schedule changes, and technician skill levels — situations that can increase complexity, for example when a difficult job requires dispatching an additional crew.
Trials with cuOpt produced route solutions in roughly 10 seconds versus more than 16 minutes on x86 CPUs, while also achieving around a 40 percent reduction in cloud costs for those operations.
Further demonstrating AT&T’s commitment to Nvidia technology, the company is exploring Omniverse ACE and Tokkio to create interactive avatars that can see, perceive, converse intelligently, and offer recommendations to enhance customer service.
“Industries are embracing a new era in which chatbots, recommendation engines, and accelerated libraries for data optimization help produce AI-driven innovations,” said Manuvir Das, VP of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA. “Our work with AT&T will help the company better mine its data to drive new services and solutions for the AI-powered telco.”
AT&T says it is also investigating additional use cases for digital twins and generative AI to further improve operations and customer experiences.
(Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash)
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