Malaysian 5G operator U Mobile announced that OpenAI will help it transform into an AI-enabled telco under a strategic collaboration agreement signed on Wednesday, with added support from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Under the agreement, U Mobile will gain early access to OpenAI's latest frontier models enabling both organisations to jointly explore, develop and implement practical AI applications across U Mobile’s business.
U Mobile and OpenAI will initially focus their explorations on things like automating internal processes, accelerating software development, enhancing data analytics and data science, supporting more intelligent network operations and cybersecurity, and strengthening brand and digital-content capabilities.
U Mobile CIO Neil Tomkinson said the telco’s collaboration with OpenAI will help it adopt AI faster, innovate faster, unlock new growth opportunities, and create greater value for its customers, enterprise partners and the wider Malaysian digital ecosystem.
“As we transform into an AI-enabled telco, we are embedding AI across every part of our business to help our people work smarter, make better decisions and focus on creating greater value for our customers,” he said in a statement. “This is not simply about adopting AI – it is about reimagining how a telco operates so we can continue setting new benchmarks for innovation, customer experience and operational excellence.”
AWS will support the project with cloud infrastructure and technical expertise, helping U Mobile develop and scale AI solutions powered by OpenAI’s frontier models, said Fred Groen, OpenAI’s head of Mid-Market GTM, Asia Pacific.
“Together with U Mobile and our partners at AWS, we will look at how AI can support every part of U Mobile’s business from helping its people work more effectively and creating better customer experiences to enabling businesses to innovate and strengthen cybersecurity,” he said.
As part of the tie-up, OpenAI also will become an anchor partner of U Mobile's Enterprise Innovation Platform (EIP) Hub, which was announced at the start of this year and officially launched earlier this week to give enterprises, technology partners, academia, advisors and public sector stakeholders a sandbox to develop, test and demonstrate 5G-Advanced, AI and other emerging technologies before scaling them into solutions.
Other anchor partners include AWS, Huawei Malaysia, Palo Alto Networks and Qualcomm.
