How Can Telcos Leverage AI?

Just about every telco is wondering to what degree AI will actually live up to the promise of transforming their entire business to one of unprecedented profitability and efficiency.

Management Consultancy firm Arthur D. Little recently published a report on the effect of AI on telcos. It looked at how telcos are adopting AI and what applications are bringing value to for them, as well as what AI is expected to bring to the industry, and what telcos can do to maximize the technology.

The firm reported on the insights from 70 chief experience officers (CxOs) from communications service providers (CSPs) to learn what daily benefits AI brings to their businesses.

The report found that 71% “emphasized improved customer experience (CX) as a primary AI benefit, including the customer-facing side of personalized sales and as an active tool for agents to improve customer support,” and that 63% are using AI “to enable intelligent network optimization and predictive maintenance, leading to improved service quality and reduced downtime.”

These results are consistent with what the telecom industry generally speaks to when discussing AI: customer service and network monitoring, two areas where the AI benefit is relatively obvious.

Customer service and sales

The report outlined a variety of AI applications in B2B and B2C sales, customer service, and customer experience, as well as examples and case studies highlighting the potential benefits to be gained.

For example, automation. “AI’s strength lies in task automation, interaction personalization, and workforce optimization. Cases across the telco industry include targeting and lead generation, predictive analytics that empower teams to sift through vast amounts of customer data, and high-potential lead identification that enables focused efforts on the most promising opportunities.”

GenAI’s ability to process and generate natural language, is a potential managerial tool in a sales context, transforming a report, say, into a tool “enabling swift opportunity identification, and real-time coaching.”

Sales productivity

The report also highlights use cases with AI that could enable teams to be more efficient, and increase output through tools such as segmentation and lead scoring:

“Through market segmentation, AI helps tailor sales approaches and messages to different customer groups, ensuring a more personalized and effective engagement strategy. Real-time lead scoring further streamlines the process, allowing sales reps to prioritize and convert leads based on their online behavior and interactions.”

Unit value and unit cost

The firm points out that AI’s various abilities can be helpful for telcos to maximize unit value and unit cost, by a plethora of means, including personalization, customization, upselling, contract analysis, pricing, and other means of applying “intelligence” to the data.

Beyond, this, AI as a customer service tool, could maximize customer interactions to work smarter and save time resources otherwise eaten up by the complexities of human interactions.

Looking ahead

“As we push toward 2030, it’s clear that AI’s role in marketing, sales, and loyalty programs will not just support the existing infrastructure, it will redefine it,” says the report.

“The onus is now on these companies to strategically invest and integrate” AI, the report continues, and identifies several key areas to do so, such as hyperpersonalization in marketing, AI-powered churn reduction, and redefining sales and channel partnerships.

You can view the full report here.