CelcomDigi looks to next phase of AWS transformation with AI in focus

As CelcomDigi’s integration is expected to be completed by the of 2027, the telco is now looking at the next phase of its partnership with AWS.

As the largest telco company in Malaysia, CelcomDigi serves around 20 million customers following the completion of its merger in November 2022. Since then, the telco has been focused on its integration and has been relying on AWS as a key technology partner in enabling them in their journey.

Speaking at the AWS Cloud and AI Day Kuala Lumpur, Albern Murty, CEO of CelcomDigi shared that the challenge in their integration transformation was not just about bringing together two giant telcos with over two decades of history together but also try to do something different.

Specifically, the aim was to create a telco that uses the best capabilities of technology, striving forward to adapt as quickly as possible, and to create a brand that is recognised in Malaysia.

“We're in our final year of integration. By the fifth year, which is the end of 2027, we will be complete with our integration. That means bringing all our customers from two different brands into one, creating one of the largest brands in Malaysia, staying humble and quick to learn, and we are still learning,” he said.

With AWS, Murty stated that the journey was all about transforming with AWS and the cloud. While that has been progressing, the next phase of the journey and the relationship with AWS is to see how they can drive customer value and be efficient in operations.

“AWS has done some really good stuff, which is to help us with modernizing big parts of our business, managing everything from device and channels to our ERP systems. We are now moving into our final phase of our billing, which is a new big billing capability that we've been waiting for.”

“Using AWS native services, Amazon Bedrock, cloud, we're doing lots of different things, including the new CelcomDigi app, which serves about 8 million of our customers. We have an ambition to take it further. What's interesting is that 90% of our workload, we wanted to migrate that to the cloud in the first five years. We've done about 75% of that. 65% of that is on AWS,” he said.

Murty also shared that it’s crucial for organizations to measure the changes and transformation and not just look at it as a tick in the box. For CelcomDigi, the success in efficiency and profitability is seen in now just cost reduction but also the efficiency in productivity, whereby tasks that took a week to solve can now be done in an hour.

On the consumer side, he shared that the focus will be on customer value management. As CelcomDigi now has the cloud capability of understanding the customer's insights, the date can be used for the right marketing capabilities.

“We're trying to understand the customers better. So CelcomDigi brings the know-how of the channels, the sales, the customers while AWS brings in the capability, the solutions around it, and then we take it up to market to be supported by AWS,” he said.

Human and technical capabilities are key

While the transformation journey with AWS has been positive, Murty also mentioned that he would like to how the partnership between AWS and CelcomDigi can be improved on the customer experience that is being built.

“When everything becomes parity, it's about how much money you can dump into networks and IT and everything else to transform. The key difference is a bit of the human side and a bit of the technical capabilities. Marrying those two is super important. I know today is AI day, but I have to say that if we are unable to bring the human advantage that we have and the AI tools and capabilities that technology provides us, we won't be able to marry the two and take maximum benefit.”

“So, while we're all in the room talking about AI and technology, don't forget the human side of things. That human AI culture is super important in Malaysia that they adopt that and put that into practice because that's where the key differentiations can be. Don't just rely on technology.”

For Murty, the brands that are successful marry those two things together extremely well. Looking ahead, he said that CelcomDigi is also looking to go more into business innovations and take new growth into SME and large-scale enterprises that are at AWS.