A new platform launched by Vodafone and Google called AI Booster aims to handle thousands of ML models a day across 18+ countries.
AI Booster is the result of 18 months of development and is built upon Google’s Vertex AI and integrates with Vodafone’s Neuron platform.
Vertex AI, among other Google technologies, had not been officially announced when Vodafone started development on AI Booster.
Cornelia Schaurecker, Global Group Director for Big Data & AI at Vodafone, said:
“To maximise business value at pace and scale, our vision was to enable fast creation and horizontal/vertical scaling of use cases in an automated, standardised manner. To do this, 18 months ago we set out to build a next-generation AI/ML platform based on new Google technology, some of which hadn’t even been announced yet.
We knew it wouldn’t be easy. People said, ‘Shoot for the stars and you might get off the ground…’ Today, we’re really proud that AI Booster is truly taking off, and went live in almost double the markets we had originally planned.
Together, we’ve used the best possible ML Ops tools and created Vodafone’s AI Booster Platform to make data scientists’ lives easier, maximise value, and take co-creation and scaling of use cases globally to another level.”
Google’s Vertex AI lets customers build, deploy, and scale ML models faster, with pre-trained and custom tooling within a unified platform.
Ashish Vijayvargia, Analytics Product Lead at Vodafone, commented:
“As a technology platform, we’re incredibly proud of building a cutting-edge MLOps platform based on best-in-class Google Cloud architecture with in-built automation, scalability, and security.
The result is we’re delivering more value from data science while embedding reliability engineering principles throughout.”
Vodafone highlighted four key features of AI Booster:
- Automated ML lifecycle compliance activities (drift/skew detection, explainability, auditability, etc.) via reusable pipelines, containers, and managed services.
- Embedded security by design.
- Capitalise on Google-native ML tooling using BQML, AutoML, Vertex AI and others.
- Boost adoption through standardised and embedded ML templates.
The new platform reportedly enables Vodafone’s data scientists and developers to slash the time of going from proof-of-concept to production from five months to just four weeks.
Vodafone and Google have forged a very close relationship in recent years. In May 2021, the two companies extended their relationship to build a global data platform.
“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, Innovation, Governance 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.”
(Image Credit: Vodafone)
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