Herbert Smith Freehills advises on formation of Global Telco AI Alliance

Herbert Smith Freehills advised the consortium of Singtel, Deutsche Telekom, e&, SK Telecom, and SoftBank Corp, five telecommunications companies headquartered in Singapore, Germany, Abu Dhabi, South Korea and Japan respectively, on their agreement to establish the Global Telco AI Alliance.

Herbert Smith Freehills team

The team was led by Dubai based corporate partners Chris Walters (pictured left) and Anna Szyndler (pictured right), with support from Dubai based associate Nicola Halliday. Specialist TMT support was provided by London based partner Hayley Brady, of counsel Heather Newton, and senior associate James Balfour.

Competition and foreign irect Investment advice was provided by a Brussels and London team of partner Kyriakos Fountoukakos, partner Veronica Roberts, of counsel Camille Puech-Baron, senior associate Sean Giles, and associates Jose Munoz and Louis Austin.

Global Telco AI Alliance

The Global Telco AI Alliance will develop and launch multilingual Large Language Models (Telco LLM), a type of AI used to generate text and perform other tasks, tailored specifically to the needs of telecommunications companies. The parties plan to invest equally in the joint venture to develop innovative AI solutions that will improve customer interactions via digital assistants and other innovative AI solutions for telcos globally.

The Telco LLM will be multilingual, supporting languages such as Korean, English, German, Arabic, and Bahasa, with plans to deploy AI applications customised to each party’s market needs across 50 countries, reaching approximately 1.3 billion customers.

The launch of the Global Telco AI Alliance is subject to regulatory approvals, on which Herbert Smith Freehills is advising.