Smart Communications, Inc., PLDT Group’s mobile services subsidiary, and Google Cloud announced a collaboration today to improve Filipinos’ access to key digital services, with Searce providing technical implementation support.
Smart will be one of the first CSPs in the Asia Pacific region to use Telecom Subscriber Insights, Google Cloud’s AI-powered solution that ingests data from various sources, provides contextual insights on subscribers’ propensity to consume services, and presents personalized recommendations to their devices for activation.
The Philippines’ digital economy is expected to grow 20% yearly until 2025. As a result, mobile connection is becoming increasingly important for Filipinos to get to basic services like food, transportation, and shopping for everyday things. By using Telecom Subscriber Insights to look at customer data safely stored on Google Cloud, Smart will get a better idea of how Filipinos use digital services and the daily problems they encounter. This will help them create services that help Filipinos understand, manage, and make the most of their mobile data usage.
Smart will also use Telecom Subscriber Insights to find patterns and gaps in connectivity to make mobile services more open to all users. With real-time information from customer data, Smart could, for example, help subscribers get the most out of their data while streaming by telling them to change the video quality. By integrating with local digital payment services, subscribers could be encouraged to add money to their prepaid plan on their devices instead of going to a store to buy a prepaid load.
“Our collaboration with Google Cloud to be the first communication services provider in Asia Pacific to adopt Telecom Subscriber Insights will empower us to better serve Filipino mobile users whenever and wherever they need us. This is a huge step toward our commitment to always put our customers first and provide them with the best mobile experience powered by our superior network,” said Alex O. Caeg, Senior Vice President and Head of Consumer Business – Individual, Smart Communications, Inc..
Smart wants more features to let subscribers interact with agents and chatbots better by combining Google Cloud’s generative AI (gen AI) features with Telecom Subscriber Insights. These features include Google’s first-party foundation models for summarizing text and keeping a conversation going. Smart could turn snapshots of these models into its private corpus, feed their responses into its services, and use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to access and fine-tune them. This way, Smart’s subscribers could talk to virtual agents that sound like real people and get more personalized, easy-to-find information about how they use their data and how to improve it.
