Vodafone, a British telecommunications company, and Google Cloud have signed a six-year strategic partnership in May 2021. The two companies recently announced an agreement to deploy the AI and ML platform “AI Booster”, jointly created, it will bring predictive capabilities to improve customer experience, network performance, accelerate research progress… of Vodafone.

Vodafone is a major telecommunications group, with 105,000 employees in 21 countries. The partnership signed with Google Cloud last year aimed to develop an integrated data platform with a large capacity for processing and analysis on a global scale from several systems to the cloud. Called Nucleus, it should enable Vodafone to provide personalized services to its subscribers, both BtoC and BtoB.

The new AI Booster platform

The result of 18 months of work, the AI Booster platform allows Vodafone to expand its AI capabilities on a large scale. Led by Vodafone’s Big Data & Ai division, it uses the latest Google technology to enable the next generation of AI use cases, such as customer experience optimization, customer loyalty and product recommendations. Its creation is driven by Vodafone Commercial’s desire to integrate more AI, machine learning (ML) and predictive capabilities into the company’s overall operations.

Cornelia Schaurecker, Global Group Director for Big Data & AI ,Vodafone, states:

“To maximize business value at pace and scale, our vision was to enable rapid creation and horizontal/vertical scaling of use cases in an automated and standardized way. To do this, 18 months ago we set out to build a next-generation AI / ML platform based on new google technology.”

The platform is reportedly already live in 18 countries and has enabled the company’s data scientists and data developers to get products and product proofs of concept up and running in four weeks when it used to take them about five months.

Cornelia Schaurecker adds:

“We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. People used to say, ‘Aim for the stars and you could take off. “Today, we are really proud that AI Booster is really taking off and has gone live in almost double the markets we originally planned. Together, we used the best possible ML Ops tools and created the Vodafone “ai Booster Platform” to make life easier for data scientists, maximize value, and take co-creation and scaling of use cases globally to another level.”

AI Booster: a scalable ML platform based on Google Cloud

AI Booster is built on Google’s Vertex AI, which enables faster creation, deployment and scaling of ML models with pre-built and customized tools within a unified platform. A cloud-native platform, it is integrated with Vodafone’s Neuron platform built on Google Cloud.

This agreement expands the partnership between Google Cloud and Vodafone and will improve data quality, reduce costs and significantly increase efficiency.

Translated from Vodafone et Google Cloud annoncent le déploiement de la plateforme IA et ML AI Booster