Vodafone and Google Cloud collaborate to launch AI Booster platform

Google Cloud and Vodafone have unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platform which aims to open up AI use case opportunities for the British telco.

The AI Booster platform has been 18 months in the making and was created to help Vodafone advance its AI capabilities. Led by the Global Big Data & AI organisation under Vodafone Commercial, the platform will use Google’s technology to open up AI use case opportunities, such as optimising customer experiences, customer loyalty, and product recommendations.

Google Cloud’s blog post announcement said that embedding AI and ML into an organisation is “easier said than done”, due to a highly regulated industry. It also means having the right platform infrastructure and developing new skills, ways of working, and processes to embed the AI.

The blog post said that the collaboration has allowed Vodafone to increase efficiency, reduce data costs, and improve data quality, allowing for more use cases that generate business value using analytics and data science.

According to Vodafone and Google Cloud, the AI Booster is capable of hosting thousands of ML models a day across more than 18 countries. They say this maximises the value of data and assists Vodafone’s data scientists and developers by reducing time from proof of concept to production from five months to four weeks.

The AI Booster is built upon Google’s Vertex AI, which allows customers to design and deploy ML models efficiently.

It also used Google Cloud data and AI partner Datatonic’s machine learning operations (ML Ops) tool in its creation.

Cornelia Schaurecker, global group director for big data and AI at Vodafone, credits the ML Ops tool in helping make “data scientist’s lives easier, maximise value and take co-creation and scaling of use cases globally to another level.”

“Vodafone’s flourishing relationship with Google Cloud is a vital aspect of our evolution toward becoming a world-leading tech communications company,” said Cengiz Ucbenli, global head of big data and AI at Vodafone.

“It accelerates our ability to create faster, more scalable solutions to business challenges like improving customer loyalty, and enhancing customer experience, whilst keeping Vodafone at the forefront of AI and data science.”