Indonesia’s Telkom Group announced on Monday that it plans to implement Meta’s Llama open-source AI model into the customer chatbots of its enterprise clients to encourage them to adopt WhatsApp as a customer channel.
Telkom said adding Llama to its chatbot solutions will enable businesses to create tailored and engaging experiences for users interacting with businesses on WhatsApp.
Telkom’s mobile unit Telkomsel already has a live chatbot named “Veronika” on WhatsApp for sales and customer support. Telkom said Llama will also be integrated into Veronika in the near future, which it says will provide a more personalized experience for users.
“Meta’s Llama will strengthen Telkomsel’s position as a leader in regional digital telecommunications,” said Arief Pradetya, Telkomsel’s VP of digital advertising, wholesale, and interconnect in a statement.
Budi Satria Dharma Purba, CEO of Telkom’s international arm Telin, said the Llama integration will be supported by Telin’s WhatsApp Business platform hosted on its cloud-based communication platform as a service (CPaaS) NeuAPIX.
The news marks the latest in a series of telecoms-related wins for Meta’s Llama LLM.
Earlier this month, Sri Lankan telco Dialog Axiata wrapped up a trial with Meta to integrate Llama into its network to enhance network optimisation and quality of experience (QoE) for its customers.
Last month, stc Group’s AI arm, stc.AI, launched an LLM sovereign cloud platform powered by Llama 405B that it claims will run the world’s largest open-source frontier model.
In November 2024, Orange partnered with Meta and OpenAI to train OpenAI’s Whisper speech model and Meta’s Llama 3.1 text model to enable them to incorporate regional languages in Africa that GenAI models don’t support.
