Herbert Smith Freehills advises on formation of Global Telco AI Alliance

Leading international law firm Herbert Smith Freehills has 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.

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 we are advising.

The team was led by Dubai based corporate partners Chris Walters and Anna Szyndler, 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 Direct 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.

Partner Chris Walters commented: "AI is dominating headlines globally at the moment and there are so many use cases currently being considered across industries and markets as participants seek to enhance efficiency, productivity and if relevant customer experience. Working with such significant founding parties that have a market share of over 1 billion customers is a great credential for our firm and one which we can look to build on with further AI focused transactional mandates."

Partner Anna Szyndler commented: "The launch of the Global Telco AI Alliance was an important milestone for the founding parties in order to innovate their business models and it's likely to accelerate AI transformation of other industries and lead the growth of the global AI ecosystem. We are proud to have supported this innovative transaction, showcasing our capabilities and building on our existing expertise in AI."