AWS Powers CelcomDigi’s Transformation into an AI-Driven Telco-Tech Company

Malaysia’s largest mobile operator pilots 15 generative AI applications to drive productivity; uses machine learning to analyze network performance for seamless connectivity

CelcomDigi leverages AWS as its key cloud provider to accelerate telco to telco-tech transformation, deploy new services faster, reduce costs, and boost customer experiences

KUALA LUMPUR - Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that CelcomDigi, Malaysia’s largest mobile operator, is collaborating with AWS as its key cloud provider to transform into an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered organization to better serve over 20 million customers. Since establishing the AI Sandbox earlier this year with AWS, CelcomDigi has built and piloted more than 15 generative AI applications to streamline operations, including leveraging machine learning (ML) to analyze its network performance, reinforcing its commitment to provide seamless mobile network coverage and service quality, a press release stated by Amazon. 

The telecommunications industry is undergoing rapid transformation to fully-digital, self-service platforms, driven by increasingly digital-native users who demand high-speed connectivity and personalized experiences. To remain competitive and continue growing their business, communications providers like CelcomDigi are optimizing their operations and service delivery by leveraging AWS Cloud to improve efficiency, scalability, and responsiveness, and building innovative AI solutions to continue enhancing the customer experience.

Optimizing performance on AWS to accelerate transformation to Telco-Tech

As part of its IT transformation masterplan, CelcomDigi will migrate close to 90% of its workloads, comprising a wide variety of mission-critical applications, to AWS over the next five years. These applications include front-end customer and dealer channels, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, API integration platform, customer experience applications, and business support systems.

Running its workloads on AWS has accelerated CelcomDigi’s service deployment from one week to under one hour, eliminating the need for hardware procurement and capacity and network planning associated with on-premises infrastructure. This has enhanced CelcomDigi’s operational agility, reduced IT operating costs by 20%, and enabled the company to continue innovating at scale while leveraging the security robustness of cloud to enhance data protection for its customers.

Leveraging generative AI to value-add and elevate the customer experience

To help CelcomDigi deliver hyper-personalized experiences and data-driven support that enhance customer service, AWS’s Prototyping and Cloud Engineering (PACE) Developer Transformation team collaborated with CelcomDigi’s developers to co-develop and launch new consumer-facing applications that are intuitive and engaging, like a self-service data management and transaction digital platform. Using Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, this application allows customers to keep track of their data and perform transactions like payments and subscriptions conveniently.

Using Amazon Bedrock, the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications with high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies, CelcomDigi is able to customize models using its own data to create tailored solutions for specific business needs. For example, CelcomDigi is exploring new customer-facing use cases, like generative AI-assisted sales agents supporting human sales agents in retail stores to make product and service recommendations to customers.

Through machine learning models built on Amazon SageMaker, CelcomDigi piloted a use case to gather and analyze crucial data on network usage to extract insights that help the company optimize its network performance and deploy enhanced network services.

Enhancing employee productivity and innovation culture with AI/ML and analytics

To drive its digital transformation, CelcomDigi has embarked on an AI and Data Acceleration (AIDA) initiative, such as growing a team of over 75 employees who are trained on AI and data analytics, including AWS capabilities, across all disciplines in the company.

CelcomDigi’s AIDA4U platform, built on Amazon Bedrock, has helped its employees including those in non-tech roles build generative AI use cases and experiment with the breadth of FMs on AWS. Using Anthropic’s Claude and Stability.AI’s Stable Diffusion models via Amazon Bedrock, CelcomDigi has experimented with developing a natural language generative AI assistant for employees to automate routine tasks across human resources, legal, and health and safety monitoring. This enables CelcomDigi to unlock new generative AI use cases, while allowing employees to focus on higher value activities like customer support.

Force multiplier in AI and analytics through AWS Partner Network

As an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, CelcomDigi is enabled to build specialized expertise in AWS's advanced technologies like machine learning, analytics, and generative AI. The company collaborates closely with AWS solution architects, and receives training and support such as AWS technical advisory to unlock new use cases for its customers across industries.

“The telco-tech industry is undergoing a transformative shift, characterized by the rapid adoption of cloud technologies and AI and data-driven innovation,” said Vikram Rao, Director, ASEAN, AWS.

“AWS is proud to support CelcomDigi in our joint commitment to advance Malaysia’s digital transformation and deliver high-quality customer experiences with AI. With the AWS Malaysia Region, CelcomDigi can build and run applications with enhanced resiliency and security, lower latency, and local data residency, further accelerating their ability to serve growing digital needs and expand their user base."

“AWS is a key partner in our journey to become a leading AI-enabled, data-first telco-tech company. By tapping into Amazon’s culture of innovation, we are rapidly prototyping and deploying new AI-powered services, which is enabling us to institutionalize operational efficiencies and deliver customer excellence,” said CelcomDigi’s CEO, Datuk Idham Nawawi. “With CelcomDigi serving as the nation’s digital growth engine, our collaboration with AWS is anchored by a shared commitment to drive innovation and support Malaysia’s transformation into a 5G-AI powered digital society.”