This is a guest post from Sharad Mehrotra, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of True Corporation
- Thailand is hyper connected, but its digital landscape remains fragmented.
- As a telecom-tech leader, True is building platforms and solutions that bridge these gaps.
- This major transformation enables seamless digital experiences, stronger cybersecurity and AI-powered services.
Our digital lives may seem convenient compared to our analog past, but they are still a mess of overlapping interfaces and systems. From booking a holiday to updating a spreadsheet based on an email attachment, our everyday interactions with digital devices often involve multiple processes and apps that do not mesh with one another.
It gets even worse with devices other than our phones, which are either not connected at all or incapable of communicating with one another. In turn, these gaps pose security risks that bad actors are keen to exploit.
The friction between our digital lives and the real world can be resolved. By global standards, Thailand has exceptionally high monthly mobile data usage and 5G coverage. If our digital landscape were less fragmented, we could reap the full benefits of digitalization.
For these reasons, bridging telecommunications and technology into one ecosystem is the ambition of True Corporation. We believe that we transforming ourselves into a telecom-tech champion can bridge Thailand’s digital gaps and unlock a new wave of growth.
Three Steps to Telecom-Tech Leadership
The first step to unlock Thailand’s digital potential is to ensure access to robust, high-speed internet nationwide. We are on track to add 16 million 5G users to our base and 4 million broadband subscribers by 2026. This builds on True and dtac’s uniquely high number of spectrum layers—seven in total. And it translates to 97% population coverage for 5G, in addition to 99% for 4G.
The second step is to simplify True’s platforms to ensure customers can enjoy the full range of our services in a single master app. Our AI-powered service assistant will be able to instantly answer complex queries. And it will be capable of guiding users across the True ecosystem seamlessly, be it for Smart Home IoT (TrueX), content streaming (TrueID), or telemedicine (Mordee).
The third step is to empower Thailand’s businesses with IoT, 5G, edge computing and AI. For example, True is the first operator in Thailand to join the GSMA Open Gateway initiative to develop Mobile Network Open APIs. This allows local developers to tap into our network infrastructure, cloud and analytics platforms easily and safely. And it reflects our new role as an orchestrator of end-to-end solutions to SMEs and large enterprises.
The friction between our digital lives and the real world can be resolved. By global standards, Thailand has exceptionally high monthly mobile data usage and 5G coverage. If our digital landscape were less fragmented, we could reap the full benefits of digitalization.
A New Way of Work
For True to realize these ambitions requires wide-scale transformation: more automation, more cloudification of data, and more artificial intelligence. This is a challenge for any business. At True, it’s a challenge on an unprecedented scale. The amalgamation of True and dtac is the largest telecom merger in Southeast Asia by combined enterprise value, and the largest ever merger of two listed companies in Thailand.
However, our merger has also given us the opportunity to simplify our IT systems and combine platforms. This will enhance the capability to automate business processes on the backend to provide better services to businesses and consumers.
The new cloud-based systems will be more efficient and agile. They will also be safer, as we are adopting a data privacy by design approach to embed control points and security features into our entire IT architecture.
Our transformation is also an opportunity to scale our adoption of AI. Today, we already use machine learning in our networks and applications. But as True becomes more digital and cloud-based, we are extending the use of AI to all our backend processes. This will greatly streamline the customer experience.
For True to realize these ambitions requires wide-scale transformation: more automation, more cloudification of data, and more artificial intelligence. This is a challenge for any business. At True, it’s a challenge on an unprecedented scale.
However, AI adoption requires strong fundamentals of digital transformation to be in place. If a process is still largely manual, it’s impossible to improve on it with machine learning. This is where True’s citizen developers come in. They work alongside tech talents to build virtual robots that tackle time-consuming work, such as filling out spreadsheets, and automates it.
Digital transformation is therefore not just an IT challenge. It requires transformation of the organization from top to bottom. We believe True has what it takes to achieve this—and not just for ourselves. By achieving our telecom-tech ambitions, we are ideally positioned to spur a new wave of growth and innovation for Thailand.
