AIS: Accelerating Digital Transformation in Thailand

Asia Pacific is the home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, with spending on digitalization in the region set to reach $1.2 trillion by 2023. With the target of becoming the digital innovation hub in Southeast Asia, Thailand has also accelerated its pace of digital transformation. In the panel discussion of the Mobile 360 APAC event in August, Tanapong Ittisakulchai, Chief Enterprise Business Officer at AIS, and David An, director of CTO group at ZTE, talked about how AIS is accelerating digital transformation in Thailand and how ZTE is helping the operator move faster.

How is AIS accelerating digital transformation in Thailand?

Tanapong Ittisakulchai: AIS is the largest telecom operator in Thailand that provides the country’s digital infrastructure as well. Over the last two years we have embarked on a 5G journey, and our vision is to drive a digital transformation for the customers and help them accelerate the transformation. We are working together with all the technology partners who have been endorsing more collaboration and also more capabilities to support the customers in the future.

Our core 5G strategy is firstly pretty much focused on building the intelligent network, and we’ve been engaged in the development of cognitive technology or capability to give greater customer support.

Second, the most important thing is leading the 5G eco-structure and eco-partners. We strongly believe that there is a side of thing we can’t make by ourselves. Therefore, to build a 5G ecosystem is very crucial for us to bring more technologies and partners as well.

Third, we will develop a digital platform for the customers. In June we announced the collaboration with Singtel. We have a Paragon platform in Thailand. We try to create an intelligent platform for customers so we can speed up how customers deploy their 5G applications.

The fourth thing will be the data-driven business. I think everyone couldn't agree more how a telecom operator can be a key player in this area. A lot of data has come to us. The data will be a natural asset for the customers in terms of the digital marking, OT, operation for the customers and so on. We can bring not only more information but also more insights, and the best action is to collaborate with the customers to find the use case to help them accelerate their business transformation.

The last but not least challenge is on the capability side. The talent will be a key challenge for telcos like us. We grow, we succeed in our own way but in a new world where we still need to learn how to manage a world with a new generation of people and make them work together with us and also drive a digital journey together.

As one of the major enablers of the digital transformations of industries, how is ZTE specifically supporting AIS’s transformation goal?

David An: AIS is the No. 1 digital service provider in Thailand. We signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement with AIS in June. Based on the agreement, ZTE is AIS’ comprehensive strategic partner to upgrade key technologies such as 5G to enhance network quality and deliver excellent user experiences to AIS customers, while developing innovations with AIS to put Thailand at the forefront of the digital economy (Thailand 4.0).

First, on technology leadership, AIS and ZTE have built Thailand’s first “A-Z Center” (5G Innovation Center) as a hub to explore, verify and deploy the latest technology. In March, AIS, Qualcomm and ZTE announced world's first 5G new radio dual connectivity (NR-DC) showcase with 2.6 GHz and 26 GHz in Thailand, achieving 8.5 Gbps peak downlink speed and 2.17 Gbps peak uplink speed with a single mobile device. It will unlock the full potential of 5G and bring the full benefits of 5G mmWave to both the consumers and enterprise customers of AIS.

Second, ZTE is working with AIS on business enabler solutions. In order to boost the application of 5G in vertical industries, we need to tailor offerings to enable enterprise on-demand self-service. ZTE Private 5G Network as a Service can help AIS explore new B2B market. We have already started with smart factory, and are moving to the more general smart campus solution.

The third one is about the network. We talk about optical and especially 5G connectivity, which is the foundation for AIS’s digital transformation. We are committed to building the best 5G network in Thailand for AIS, and will upgrade AIS’s 5G network to an autonomous network capable of precise autonomous network management.

In summary, we are supporting AIS’s digital transformation in terms of technology, business and network.

Thailand has a 4.0 strategy. Now we are always talking about digital advancements such as 5G+AIoT, Metaverse, Cloud and Blockchain in empowering the transformation and innovation in industries such as finance, healthcare, automobile, manufacturing, education, entertainment and public sectors. Can you give us examples of some industries or particular customers where your work is helping them with their digital transformation?

Tanapong Ittisakulchai: Basically it is not just to provide 5G as a technology to the customers. In the past when we moved to the next G, it is about the speed, which is mainly applied to the consumer market. But 5G brings a different way of disrupting the market. It supports low latency and also a massive scale of IoT devices, which brings much more value to the enterprise customers. Key segments that we are focused on include manufacturing, retail, transportation and property. We bring and select several technologies, and we truly believe in building and leading the partner framework. We try to be the one who pulls all the best technologies from the networking, cloud, cyber security, IoT and blockchain.

All in all, we need to have more collaboration with the customers. They have the business issue, but they aren’t pretty much keen on the technologies. We have a lot of technology bullets in our pocket but we don't know where to shoot. We need to bring these together. We do a lot of collaboration, workshops, co-create things and learn to fail. We learn from several projects where we try and fail, and now you can see more and more use cases where you can integrate several technologies together because as an operator we have the data center, we have connectivity, IoT, MBIoT, 5G, 4G, clouds, and cyber security. Once we bring these together on board, we can help our customers move faster in the digital transformation.

One of the areas that we work with ZTE is in the Suranaree university. We bring the technology for them to drive several use case solutions like 5G robotics, 5G machine vision, AR and VR. This is still just the horizontal solution. But more value will be added to the vertical solution, and now we are also working a lot in several areas. That needs more collaboration with our customers, partners, and players in the market, especially those on the OT side which the telco and IT are also not familiar with. My background also came from an OT player. That will be the area that we can create the collaboration on the customer side—IT technology and OT technology will drive the 5G business so that we can help our customers drive the transformation.