Telefónica Tech, Telefónica’s strategic digital business unit, and Sherpa.ai have signed a strategic agreement to develop new use cases in the Spanish market with advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) using federated learning technologies. The federated learning technique allows to train the AI algorithms and learning models of public and private companies without the need to share their data.
Telefónica Tech will offer its customers Sherpa.ai’s ‘SaaS Privacy-Preserving’ platform and will combine the Basque company’s capabilities in the field of federated learning with the knowledge and experience of Telefónica’s digital business unit in the provision of professional services in the field of analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
The platform will provide companies with the ability to innovate in the training of their Artificial Intelligence models and to explore new scenarios of collaboration between organisations, always complying with the highest security standards. In fact, the data used for learning never leaves the company’s servers to protect the process.
The application of the platform will also generate significant improvements in the accuracy of predictions and a greater impact of the algorithms on business processes and results, as well as a reduction in energy consumption in training and a reduction in the carbon footprint.
As a result of this alliance, Telefónica Tech and Sherpa.ai will be able to promote Artificial Intelligence use cases in sectors such as healthcare and finance, where knowledge sharing is key to improving their operations. Thus, for example, the platform and the professional services that Telefónica Tech will offer its clients will contribute to improving predictive algorithms to facilitate the early diagnosis of diseases or to detect possible fraudulent behaviour by combining information from different organisations.
According to Gonzalo Martín-Villa, CEO of IoT and Big Data at Telefónica Tech, “the alliance with Sherpa.ai is a great opportunity to bring the potential and benefits of federated learning technology to our customers and to continue expanding our portfolio with advanced artificial intelligence use cases that will help companies optimise their businesses”.
Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, founder and CEO of Sherpa.ai, explains: “We are very pleased with this agreement with Telefónica Tech because it will allow us, on the one hand, to expand the perimeter in the commercialisation of our federated learning platform and, thanks to it, to develop use cases to significantly improve financial, operational and sustainability results”.
