- Analysts Dom Black and Dean Bubley delivered some deep dive insights into how AI is reshaping the telecom industry
- Black noted customer care is a key use case for telcos, but warned consumers aren't convinced
- Bubley pointed to opportunities to capitalize on voice exchanges using reams of metadata telcos have never tapped
AI is changing the game in telecom, but it’s not just shaping how telcos operate. It’s also shifting what kinds of product sets customers expect from them. At Alianza’s Navigate event in Salt Lake City, Utah, this week, analysts broke down the threats and opportunities that are in front of operators.
Here’s our rundown of the biggest takeaways accompanied by photos of some really cool dinosaur bones we got to see during an evening reception held at the local Natural History Museum. Because who doesn't love dino bones?
AI for customer care
AI in the call center is one use case telcos have latched on to as an easy internal AI target. But consumers are apparently not as convinced that AI is the ticket to better service, Dom Black, Principal Analyst at U.K.-based firm Cavell, said.
He noted Cavell’s research has found 49% of consumers believe they have to speak to a human to get their desired results. Only 23% think chatbots are any good at handling customer issues.
“I think the biggest worry is we’re going to race toward this and customer service will continue to get worse and worse as we go,” he said.
Cavell predicted about 20% of contact center jobs will be replaced by AI by 2029. Black noted that means there will still be a “massive role” for humans in the contact center, but said those roles are changing. Already, 45% of contact center agents have said they’ve seen an increase in the complexity of the tasks they’re asked to handle since the introduction of AI.
The AI enterprises want to buy
It’s no secret that businesses of all sizes are experimenting with AI. As far as operators are already engaged with clients to provide communications solutions, Black said there’s an opportunity to sell AI as well. And the more options on offer, the better.
Black noted 42% of respondents Cavell spoke to in its enterprise AI study said they would approach their existing communications provider to see what AI they could provide to enhance the solutions already in play. “If you don’t have those AI solutions…they’re going to go find someone who can deliver that,” he warned.
Black highlighted the wild success of software marketplaces like AWS’ for cloud solutions, suggesting that a similar model could work for telcos reselling AI products.
“I think what this shows for you is as providers, you need to start building your own marketplace-esque like products,” he said. “If you’re just selling one or two products – might not be good enough.”
So, what kinds of products exactly do they want? Enterprises in Cavell’s study indicated voice fraud protection, voice recording and PCI compliance were the top three products they would buy from their telco provider.
Voice renAIssance
Disruptive Analysis Founder Dean Bubley also took to the stage to offer his take on where telcos can win in the AI market. Their secret weapon? Voice.
Telcos have an obvious advantage given they are smack dab in the middle of the call path. While that’s one avenue to explore (as Alianza enthusiastically is), Bubley said telcos need to think bigger. Voice is more than just phone calls, and telcos have plenty of microphone-equipped touchpoints (CPE, IoT devices, etc.) that they could use to deliver innovative, AI-enabled services, he said.
“Anything spoken or any sound is in remit,” he said. The key, he added, is understanding the context and the ‘why’ behind what’s being spoken.
Most don’t often think about it, but Bubley noted spoken exchanges contain a lot of metadata: tone, volume, time of day, the relationship between the parties involved, etc. While calls today are generally a one-size-fits-all scripted exchange, telcos have an opportunity to dig into this metadata to revolutionize voice interactions.
“The problem is that we have a call product and we don’t understand what it’s for,” he said. Bubley pointed out that speaking with a family member is very different from speaking with a business or fielding a spam call, but the industry doesn’t really have a breakdown of how much time on its networks is spent on each kind of interaction.
“That has left us open to competition from, frankly, better and more agile players from the internet world. Because we have the same product for calling a loved one and calling the bank.”
According to Bubley, the four main areas where telcos have an opportunity to enrich voice with AI are call optimization (think contextual background noise cancellation, call screening, scheduling, recording, transcription, translation, etc.); health and security (think elder check ins and bank fraud prevention); smart home and alarms; and voice assistants or agents.