AT&T is to use of a full suite of NVIDIA AI offerings which includes enhancing its data processing using the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, which includes the NVIDIA RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark; enabling real-time vehicle routing and optimisation with NVIDIA cuOpt; adopting digital avatars with NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine and NVIDIA Tokkio; and using conversational AI with NVIDIA Riva.
“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 pledged to become carbon neutral by 2035 and has implemented broad initiatives to make its operations more efficient.
AT&T first adopted NVIDIA RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark to capitalise on energy-efficient GPUs across its AI and data science pipelines.
Of the data and AI pipelines targeted with Spark-RAPIDS, AT&T saves about half of its cloud computing spend and sees faster performance, while reducing its carbon footprint.
“Industries are embracing a new era in which chatbots, recommendation engines and accelerated libraries for data optimisation help produce AI-driven innovations,” said Manuvir Das, vice president 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 is currently testing NVIDIA cuOpt software to enhance its field dispatch capabilities to handle more complex technician routing and optimisation challenges.
In early trials, cuOpt delivered solutions in 10 seconds, while the same computation on x86 CPUs took 1,000 seconds. This resulted in a 40% reduction in cloud costs and allowed technicians to complete more service calls each day.
NVIDIA cuOpt allows AT&T to run nearly continuous dispatch optimisation software by combining NVIDIA RAPIDS with local search heuristics algorithms and metaheuristics such as Tabu search.
As part of its efforts to improve productivity for its more than 150,000 employees, AT&T is moving to adopt NVIDIA Omniverse ACE and NVIDIA Tokkio.
For conversational AI, the carrier also uses the NVIDIA Riva software development kit and is examining other customer service and operations use cases for digital twins and generative AI.
AT&T also is taking advantage of fast 5G and its fibre network to deliver NVIDIA GeForce NOW cloud gaming at 120 frames per second on mobile and 240 FPS at home.
