Eric Davis, vice president and head of AI tech collaboration at SK Telecom, speaks during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Seoul, Tuesday. Courtesy of SK Telecom

SK Telecom is set to launch Telco LLM, a large language model (LLM) specialized for the telecommunications industry, to help AI improve work efficiency by learning about complicated telecom industry concepts such as mobile plans, memberships and device subsidies, the company said, Tuesday.

The mobile carrier said that the large-sized deep learning model to train its AI model will help its employees significantly reduce the time spent on customer service tasks while customers can also experience faster service responses.

Telco LLM is a multi-LLM developed in collaboration with AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, SK Telecom said adding that it is developing the model by applying it to multiple LLMs such as SK Telecom's LLM A.X, OpenAI's LLM GPT and Anthropic's LLM Claude.

"Addressing the various services and issues telecom companies face with a single general-purpose LLM is challenging," Eric Davis, vice president and head of AI tech collaboration at SK Telecom, said during a press conference in Seoul.

"We have created various Telco LLMs through fine-tuning and benchmarking tailored to telecom data and domain know-how, making it possible to select and use the most suitable model for various situations."

SK Telecom emphasized that Telco LLM is more useful than general-purpose LLMs because it can perform high-level generative AI tasks within the telecom sector.

General-purpose LLMs may not adequately learn specialized knowledge such as the procedures for transferring telecom numbers, which makes it difficult to give an adequate response to customer requests such as mobile plan recommendations. But Telco LLM has learned this knowledge through fine-tuning, the company said.

SK Telecom highlighted that the introduction of Telco LLMs is expected to significantly reduce the current customer service response time, which takes more than 3 minutes and 30 seconds. The LLM can provide solutions to consultants while on a call with customers. The company added it plans to continue expanding the use cases of Telco LLM.

"Telco LLM will increase operational efficiency not only in customer service centers but also in other sectors such as marketing, supply chain, customer touchpoints and even internal operations such as legal services and human resources management," said Jeong Min-young, vice president of the company and head of its AI platform.