The benefits of using AI/ML in anomaly detection

Telecom Business Review | Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Telecom invoices are among the most complicated forms of invoices produced in any company, and errors are unavoidable given the vast quantity and variety of viable products and services. 

Fremont, CA:The complexity of telecom contracts, products, and billing processes makes telecom invoices one of the industry's most complex ones. Billing problems and anomalies are widespread as a result. 

Anomalies are a widespread problem in many businesses, including the telecom industry. Telecom anomalies can occur anywhere in numerous Telecom operations and might be connected to network performance, security breaches, or fraud. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasingly used to overcome these difficulties in recent years.

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Telecom invoices are among the most complicated forms of invoices produced in any company, and errors are unavoidable given the vast quantity and variety of viable products and services. Products are constructed from product qualities, and the sheer amount of these features and their numerous combinations give rise to such types.

To add to this is the billing process complexity, which presents various challenges. A periodic bill is a regular billing process, but all other bills or bill requests result in deviations from the standard procedure – and may result in anomalies. Convergent billing also means it’s possible to have a single bill for multi-play contract(s) with cross-promotions and volume discounts, making billing challenges. Moreover, many organizations have a setup where different departments have different invoice and payment responsibilities, which complicates the billing process.

With 5G, products and services – and subsequently the billing process – become even more complicated. Service providers are gearing up to address varied enterprise models, such as ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), or massive machine-type communication (mMTC). The rollout of 5G also heralds a revolution of IoT devices.

3GPP with 5G has introduced the concept of network slicing (NW slice) and the associated service-level agreements (SLAs) — another dimension that will add to the complexity of the billing process.

During the past few years, all industries have seen a strong focus on AI/ML technologies, and there’s certainly a reason why AI/ML leverages data-driven programming and unearths value latent in data. Previously unknown insights can now get discovered using AI/ML – which is the main driver behind using AI/ML in invoice anomaly detection and a big part of what makes it so appealing. It can help service providers understand the unknown reasons behind invoice anomalies. Moreover, it can offer real-time analysis, greater accuracy, and much wider coverage.

The other benefit of AI/ML is the ability to learn from its predictions, which are fed back into the system as a reward or penalty. This helps to learn not only the patterns of today but also new patterns which may arise in the future.

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