AI Offers Revenue Growth and Operational Enhancement Opportunities for the Telecom Industry

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Faisal Ishaq, Client Partner, EPAM Systems, Inc.

Telcos face several unique challenges that can jeopardize their ability to stay competitive in today’s fierce markets. For starters, connectivity has become essential to the average person living in the developed world, and telcos must deliver seamless services and new experiences to these modern customers.

At the same time, there is significant pressure to drive down costs within the organization. There is also the issue of legacy IT estates, the elephant in the room that telcos must transform and re-engineer accordingly.

In light of these challenges, Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers the telco industry three key opportunities to uplift the customer experience (CX), enhance network operations and create new, personalized products.

Enrich Customer Experience through AI-Power Support Tools

Research shows that 87% of telecom executives see potential in AI technologies positively impacting CX and customer relationship management. Telcos can boost CX by enriching their call centers and customer support channels’ existing capabilities with Generative AI (GenAI), large language models and natural language processing, creating intuitive, always-available chatbots and virtual assistants that will enable free-flowing dialogs.

Integrating AI capabilities into the customer service environment will help automate the bulk of customer inquiries, such as checking balances, paying bills and troubleshooting issues, permitting human agents to focus on more complex tasks and higher-value interactions. This automation will help telcos strip out costs in their organizations, with research from Gartner showing that AI in the telco industry will reduce labor costs by $80 billion by 2026. These sophisticated AI-powered chatbots can also leverage customer history and behavior data to deliver personalized services and offerings, such as tailored scripts for next-best offerings, shifting CX from a transactional model to a conversational one.

AI-powered tools can further elevate CX by supporting human agents in real-time. During customer interactions, AI tools can perform live sentiment analysis, recommending, for example, if an agent should escalate a particularly frustrated customer to a manager. Likewise, these AI-power support solutions can look-up data mid-call, ensuring the interaction has as few breaks or pauses as possible. After an interaction, these tools can also generate post-call notes and summaries for the agent to review and refine their skills.

Improve Network Operations with Proactive and Dynamic Capabilities 

The network continues to suffer from call dropouts, data coverage gaps and congestion; thankfully, AI provides telcos with an opportunity to make meaningful improvements to the strength of the network, boosting customer satisfaction. In particular, telcos can enhance network management through intelligent automation, moving away from reactive to predictive ways of working.

Telcos can use AI-powered predictive analytics to identify patterns that could indicate possible network failures. By predicting and proactively addressing network issues before they snowball, telcos can safeguard service delivery and reduce potential maintenance costs. Such technological foresight can also help anticipate user density and traffic and adjust bandwidth proactively to maintain consistent service levels, mitigating congestion during peak times and ensuring network issues don’t affect customers.

Telcos can also use AI to manage network resources dynamically in response to service demand fluctuations, automating adjustments to their service provisions and resource allocation to help improve service quality. For example, should a sudden influx occur, a telco could spin additional bandwidth, preventing call and data drops.

In addition to pre-empting issues, AI will enable telcos to automate various networking operations. AI can mine unstructured data to identify patterns and make inferences that humans would otherwise miss. This capability (including deep learning and reinforcement learning) makes it ideal for accelerating network planning and design processes.

Enhance Existing Products and Build out an AI-Based Portfolio

The third opportunity AI presents for telcos is the enhancement and advent of new, personalized products. While AI is certainly a tool for optimization and automation, it can also enhance product innovation and diversification, and by using AI to recognize customer usage patterns and behavior, telcos can create personalized services and products that grow and diversify their revenue streams.

The connected home is one emerging area where telcos can deliver unique products and offerings, such as home security or bundled in-home management. For instance, they could provide automated energy systems based on customer preferences, e.g., lighting and heating. However, to support hyper-personalized products, telcos must maintain the data within their ecosystem to understand their customers and their entire families. The behavior of individuals within a family unit is very different, and telcos delineate between the family as a unit and the individuals that comprise it. 

Beyond augmenting existing services with AI capabilities, telcos can deliver novel products and build entire AI-based portfolios. One interesting opportunity is fraud prevention via an AI solution that can automatically analyze voice intonation and threatening behavior to determine if a call is fraudulent.

A Turning Point in Telecom

With many telcos having endured a period of stagnation, AI represents a prime moment to reenergize and leap into a future of personalized, efficient and robust communications. However, the time of AI is of the essence as these AI tools and technologies are available to every telco, and the speed of adoption and quality of execution will mean a difference in today’s highly competitive market. To that end, telcos – incumbent or veteran – should seek assistance from a technology partner that can help streamline the transformation into a truly AI-first business.

About the Author:

Faisal Ishaq is an experienced telecommunications professional with more than 25 years of experience covering various roles with a focus on business development, account management and regional leadership.

As a client partner, Faisal manages and nurtures relationships with telecom clients, advising them on EPAM’s portfolio of telecom solutions and services to achieve their business objectives. Prior to his current role at EPAM, Faisal held senior positions at leading firms, including Aria Systems, Ericsson, Sigma Systems and Amdocs.

Mr. Ishaq holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Business Studies from De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Industry Viewpoint