Led by its Global Big Data & AI business as part of Vodafone Commercial, AI Booster uses Google technology to enable next-gen AI use cases, such as optimising customer experiences, customer loyalty, and product recommendations.
“To maximise business value at pace and scale, our vision was to enable fast creation and horizontal / vertical scaling of use cases in an automated, standardised manner," said Cornelia Schaurecker, global group director for big data & AI at Vodafone.
To do this, 18 months ago we set out to build a next-generation AI / ML platform based on new Google technology, some of which hadn’t even been announced yet. Today, we’re really proud that AI Booster is truly taking off and went live in almost double the markets we had originally planned."
Vodafone has moved its data into a single 'source of truth' on Google Cloud, enabling the extraction of more value from its data and significantly increasing efficiency, reducing data costs, and improving data quality. This in turn has enabled use cases that generate business value using analytics and data science.
The next phase involved building industrial scale ML, capable of processing thousands of ML models a day across 18+ countries, while streamlining data science processes and keeping up with technological growth.
“As a technology platform, we’re incredibly proud of building a cutting-edge MLOps platform based on best-in-class Google Cloud architecture with in-built automation, scalability and security. The result is we’re delivering more value from data science, while embedding reliability engineering principles throughout,” added Ashish Vijayvargia, analytics product lead at Vodafone
Build on Google’s Vertex AI – technology that enables customers to build, deploy, and scale ML models faster, with pre-trained and custom tooling within a unified platform - Vodafone’s AI Booster is a fully managed cloud-native platform that integrates with Vodafone’s Neuron platform, a data ocean built on Google Cloud.
“Our overarching vision was a single ML platform-as-a-service that scales horizontally (business use cases across markets) and vertically (from PoC to Production). For this, we needed innovative solutions to make it both technically and commercially feasible," said Sebastian Mathalikunnel, AI Booster product manager at Vodafone.
According to Mathalikunnel this includes:
automated ML lifecycle compliance activities (drift / skew detection, explainability, auditability, etc.) via reusable pipelines, containers, and managed services.
embedded security by design.
Leveraged Google-native ML tooling using BQML, AutoML, Vertex AI and others.
accelerated adoption through standardised and embedded ML templates.
"The Google & Vodafone partnership continues to go from strength to strength, and together, we are accelerating the digital future and finding new ways to keep people connected," said James Ma, Head of Technical Account Management, Telco, EMEA, Google Cloud, in a blog post.
