Econet CEO, Douglas Mboweni has said the company recently discovered a lot of customers were using the internet at the wrong speed. The company credits the discovery to the deployment of AI on the network to help uncover issues customers are facing.
Said Mboweni in a release to the media:
“We recently discovered that more than a million handsets had been configured at the wrong speed, preventing customers from properly accessing services such as TikTok and YouTube or watching short videos without buffering. With AI, we can now identify the affected handsets. We will in fact soon advise customers on how to change their settings or invite them to visit our shops for assistance.”
Mboweni called this a “breakthrough”, which just says how much of an impact it has on the company. Customers having connectivity problems on their devices is not a good thing for Econet. Customers happily consuming data means more revenue for Econet. Doesn’t make business sense for the company to invest in the latest network infrastructure (5G and 4G) only for this capacity to not be used. This could unlock internet bandwidth use and revenue growth, essentially sweating its investment in infrastructure.
The company also said it’s implementing some 20 artificial intelligence initiatives to improve business operations and customer experience.
This likely refers to internal deployments under the main company itself and not necessarily new products under the new AI focused subsidiary, Econet AI. Products like EcoAI Tokens. Or it could be both network stuff and new products given today’s press release mentions the 100 AI engineers recruited for Econet AI that was first mentioned last month.
Econet also mentioned 2 other breakthroughs; a new ability to trace network faults in minutes vs. hours/days without AI assistance before;
The company has said it’s investing significantly in AI. Mboweni said today “We now have access to AI capabilities at a scale unmatched in Africa, supported by our own cloud infrastructure, which is being deployed right now, as we speak.”
Definitely interesting times. The company actually announced in a separate release this week that it has moved all of its operations to the Google Cloud Platform. I’m not clear yet how everything is connected. Where Econet Infrastructure starts and ends. Where Google infrastructure starts and ends. What of Liquid Intelligent Technologies with its Microsoft bias in cloud platforms? And where Econet InfraCo fits in all this.
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