Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI can drive efficiencies, improve customer experience and be a source of product and service innovation.

AI is changing the way the world does business, and it is no different in the telecom industry. The key areas where telcos are investing in AI include:

• Improvement of customer service through chatbots and virtual assistants
  Telcos get a massive number of customer service requests for installation, troubleshooting and maintenance. Virtual assistants automate and scale responses to these requests at high speeds, which dramatically cuts business expenses and improves customer satisfaction. Vodafone’s chatbot TOBi and Nokia’s virtual assistant MIKA or Telefonica’s Aura are good examples of telcos leveraging chatbots and VAs to deliver superior customer experience at lower costs.
• Network quality improvement using predictive maintenance and self-organizing networks (SON)
  Prevention of outages using AI/ML predictive models can enhance customer experience while delivering huge cost savings by preventing costly support calls and reactive truck rolls.
• Fraud Detection and Prevention
  Fraud is a big driver of costs and bad customer experience. To prevent fraud, telcos end up putting restrictive policies, checks and balances that make life difficult even for their genuine customers. AI/ML allows companies to leapfrog in their ability to predict and detect fraud using the sophisticated models and massive data at their disposal. They can now implement more nuanced controls that are razor-focused on fraudulent activity.
• Personalized recommendations
  As telcos shift more of their business to digital channels, AI- based predictive models allow them to build more personalized offers and purchase journeys, thereby improving overall adoption of digital channels and improving KPIs like revenue, cross- selling/upselling, etc.

Nitin’s conclusion:

5G is certainly a game-changer for telecom operators because it has the ability to open new revenue fronts, at the same time also shifting the balance of customer ownership in their favour from the OTT players. However, in order to capitalize on this opportunity, telcos will have to ensure timely modernization of legacy Infrastructure, develop digital channels more effectively and adopt emerging technologies like AI and ML to deliver world-class customer experience.