How telecom brands can seize industry opportunities with AI

The telecom industry is fundamentally about connectivity. It’s no wonder, then, that its leaders are trying to address the disconnect between what AI promises and what it delivers.

Those who bridge the gap will find themselves in a particularly strong position at a time when telecom players are facing mounting infrastructure costs and growing customer expectations. According to a McKinsey survey of industry CEOs, two-thirds of respondents predict that their capital outlays will accelerate over the next three-to-five years, whereas only one-third expect a similar lift in their revenues. Despite difficult economics, leaders can’t cut corners with their customers, as “nothing excuses a bad customer experience,” according to 55% of respondents in a TELUS Digital survey.

Developments in AI have emerged at the industry’s moment of need, with thoughtful implementations offering pathways for telecom brands to reduce costs and deliver superior customer experiences. Holistic AI transformation can increase incremental revenue by up to 8% annually, reduce the cost-to-serve by 10-15% and lift customer satisfaction scores by 20 to 40 points, according to the same McKinsey report.

What follows is a look at the ways in which we’re seeing brands use AI, and particularly generative AI, to shape the future of connectivity. This is from our unique vantage point as a subsidiary of TELUS, a world-leading communications technology company. Our position enables us to act as an industry insider capable of applying first-hand knowledge of industry imperatives, as well as expertise across customer experience (CX) and AI, in support of more than 30 global communications and media brands.

Telecom brands are delivering better customer experiences with AI

Customers expect service that is fast, accurate and relevant to their needs, and in numerous ways generative AI (GenAI) is helping brands to meet these expectations, according to Monty Hamilton, chief product and marketing officer at TELUS Digital. “We’re seeing brands in the telecom space leverage generative AI to deliver highly personalized experiences and offerings, making sure that their customers are not only getting what they ask for now, but also what they might ask for next.”

Let’s take a closer look at several applications of GenAI that are helping telecom brands deliver superior customer experiences.

Intelligent virtual assistants help brands meet expectations for responsiveness

When TELUS Digital asked enterprise leaders about their GenAI plans for 2025, 71% said that the technology is a key driver for improving customer service delivery.

With intelligent virtual assistants fueled by AI, telecom brands are able to handle customer queries, anytime, anywhere. If, for example, a mobile customer is traveling abroad and needs support outside of your regular service hours, a capable virtual assistant can step in and provide the required guidance. And, if that same customer wants to speak with an agent at the next available opportunity, the virtual assistant could assist in scheduling a callback, booking in time without human intervention. Although this is just one example, it represents a significant step forward in responsiveness that leaders shouldn’t overlook: 71% of customers expect companies to communicate with them in real-time, per Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report.

Intelligent virtual assistants that are agent-facing can also help frontline team members provide increasingly informed, accurate responses to customer queries by surfacing and summarizing knowledge base information. When properly implemented, this type of application positively influences a host of metrics, including first call resolution rates, customer satisfaction and agent effort. That’s something we’ve seen happen with Fuel iX™ Agent Copilot, a GenAI-driven platform designed to enhance agent productivity and streamline customer interactions. It provides a customizable, intelligent assistant that supports agents in real-time by transcribing conversations, retrieving relevant knowledge and suggesting actions based on context. By leveraging advanced language models and integrated knowledge sources, Agent Copilot helps customer service representatives quickly find the information they need, generate quality responses and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Digital customer experience priorities in 2025

Discover the digital customer experience priorities of enterprise leaders with survey results from TELUS Digital, in collaboration with Statista.

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A new level of personalization is made possible by AI

On a recent episode of our podcast, Questions for now, expert guests discussed the prompt, “The era of AI-driven personalization is here. What now?” Speaking about how much the discourse around personalization has changed, David Caudle, vice president of strategic transformation at TELUS Digital, explained that five years ago, when people thought about personalization, they thought simply of segmentation. “But today,” Caudle went on to say, “With the technologies that are available, the bar is just set so high and we see brands that can deliver upon it. If you're not organizing your business around the customer and personalizing those customer moments, you're falling behind other brands.”

In fact, an emphatic 81% of customers favor brands that offer personalized customer experiences, per Forbes’ State of Customer Service and CX report. The standard has been set by the most innovative companies in the world and telecom brands must rise to the challenge.

Applied AI can help industry brands personalize immediate service interactions. A company might use algorithms to process a customer’s unstructured data, including account information, customer service transcripts, usage patterns and more. This company could then use insights derived from the data to tailor the service they deliver across channels and touchpoints. Perhaps a brand has learned that a particular customer carefully tracks their data usage on a daily basis — that brand could then foreground relevant metrics in their mobile app for this customer’s convenience. Or, if the brand knows that the customer has a busy work life and prefers to receive support asynchronously via email rather than a phone call, they can prioritize the email channel for future communications. The key, ultimately, is to use AI to develop a better understanding of the human customer on the other side, and to make specific improvements to the experience based on that understanding.

Brands can use AI to proactively address looming problems

AI is enabling new possibilities for anticipatory CX. Brands can proactively identify and address issues before they arise, working to take preventative action against customer churn.

“In the telecom industry, we’re seeing brands use AI for a myriad of predictive use cases,” Monty asserts. “Think about network monitoring. Let’s say AI is used to monitor network equipment and identifies a pattern of minor fluctuations in a cell tower’s power supply. It perceives that a failure could arise within the next 48 hours and issues an alert to a maintenance team to replace specific components. That can drive meaningful customer satisfaction.”

On an individual customer level, AI can be used to equip your retention team with the information they need to save customer relationships. According to survey data from TechSee, 39% of Americans who had canceled a contract within the past 24 months cited “customer service” as the cause for doing so, with 52% of those respondents indicating that the contract was for phone, internet and, TV or cable services. To minimize churn, your agents could be informed of not just who is a churn risk and why (whether that be declining usage or knowledge base searches about account termination), but also recommendations for personalized offers that are likely to appeal to the customer.

AI uncovers relevant cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

Upon developing an understanding of customer data, sophisticated algorithms can offer up specific and relevant recommendations for plans, add-ons and promotions. These recommendations can then be supplied to your sales team in order to make contact with the customer, or leveraged in the form of push notifications or in-app messages. And while this might seem removed from the customer experience, the important thing to remember is that these recommendations are derived from a deep understanding of the customer’s behavior and interests.

For example, by analyzing usage patterns across a family plan, a telecom company’s AI might recommend redistributing data allowances among family members or suggest adding a specific feature (like unlimited streaming) that would benefit the whole group. To offer another example, AI could analyze a business customer's usage patterns and detect a significant increase in international calls to a specific region. Based on this insight, the system could recommend an international calling package tailored to that region, timing the offer to coincide with the start of a new billing cycle. This approach can not only reduce costs for the business customer, but also increases their satisfaction by providing a solution that precisely matches their evolving needs.

David Caudle put this succinctly in the aforementioned podcast episode. He explained, “When you interact with the customer around customer service, the idea is to move the moment of need, shift left, and be able to be more proactive and preemptive so [you’re] not always reacting to the customer. You understand what they want, you have their data and you're able to anticipate any problems or positive experiences, up-sells, cross-sells based on the needs of the customer.”

Fortify your revenue assurance and fraud prevention programs with AI

Beyond stimulating new business, AI is being deployed by telecom brands to minimize revenue leakage and fraud-related loss.

According to Grand View Research, fraud is one of the key contributors to revenue leakages in the telecom industry. A survey conducted by the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA) found that telecom operators lost approximately $39 billion to fraud in 2023 alone.

AI is capable of reviewing vast amounts of transaction data, in real time, and identifying suspected fraud, billing errors and other irregularities. In an era when AI is being used by bad actors to perpetuate financial crime, telecom brands must fight fire with fire. Generative AI can be used to improve your fraud analytics programs, summarizing and relaying vital information to your fraud prevention experts in language that they can understand. This not only prevents loss, but also preserves the resources of your team members so that they can apply focus where human expertise is needed. Better still, what your AI discerns can be used to further enhance your security posture on a go-forward basis.

Partner with an industry insider for accelerated AI adoption

Two-thirds (67%) of telecom brands reported revenue increases from AI, but 34% say that “there are too few data scientists to support their AI aspirations,” per NVIDIA research. It’s clear that there is consensus around the potential for AI in the telecom industry, but challenges in realizing that potential.

These findings align with our own survey results, which found that 82% of leaders are currently working with, or planning to work with, an outsourcing partner in 2025 to achieve their goals. Surveyed leaders are focusing their outsourcing efforts on AI, with AI-driven customer interactions (44%), data analytics (43%) and AI-driven agent interactions (36%) being the most common outsourcing use cases.

Forming a strategic partnership with an outsourcing provider has a number of benefits, including:

• Accelerated time to market: By working with a partner, telecom brands can gain access to pre-built solutions and frameworks, established implementation methodologies and ready-to-use AI models and tools. And beyond implementation timelines, there is a great deal of time to be saved for those who leverage GenAI tools effectively. TELUS team members, for example, are boosting their own productivity, saving an average of 40 minutes each time they use our internal GenAI tools for tasks such as research, document development, data analysis, coding and more — adding up to more than 500,000 hours saved to date, the equivalent of over 62,000 working days.
• Added expertise: It can be difficult to source the specialized talent you need to guide your AI efforts. Partnership can save you that trouble, supplying you with the expertise you need without competing for talent on your own. The ideal partner for telecom brands will have a deep understanding of telecom-specific AI applications, and best practices learned from multiple implementations.
• Risk mitigation: AI regulation differs geographically and changes continuously. A partner with a track record of managing complex compliance programs will help you to stay onside by setting up reliable data privacy, protection and governance frameworks. What’s more, an outsourcing provider should be able to help you manage technical risks as you build out your AI tech stack, helping you to avoid vendor lock-in.

As a partner to media and communications brands, TELUS Digital implements AI-fueled solutions that enhance the customer experience. Take for example, TELUS’ GenAI-powered support tool for TELUS.com — one of the first customer-accessible GenAI solutions from a Canadian organization. Powered by our enterprise-grade AI engine, Fuel iX, and Microsoft OpenAI Service, the GenAI support tool has already answered more than 50,000 customer queries, helping 28% more customers find the information they are looking for versus conventional site search on their own.

Looking to shape the future of connectivity?

“Our research indicates that only 10% of brands consider themselves at a ‘steady state’ with GenAI,” says Monty Hamilton. “There’s a huge opportunity here for telecom brands to distinguish themselves from their competitors with AI. The ones that can rise above challenges sourcing the required expertise will be the victors.”

That’s especially true for telecom leaders and leading telecom brands seeking to take their AI initiatives even further. Agentic AI — which introduces autonomous agents capable of an advanced level of decision-making and task completion — is already starting to dominate conversations about AI’s potential. At TELUS Digital, we are determined to be an active participant pushing the boundaries of the technology and shaping the future of connectivity.

If you’re ready to fuel your customer experience with AI and telecom expertise, contact us today.