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From AI-powered agents to personified customer experiences, telcos must adapt to new trends, tackle network challenges, and upskill their workforce. Building trust and a cognitive digital core is key.
6-Minute Read
February 20, 2025
The communications industry is accustomed to being at the edge of technological innovation, and like many others, has changed dramatically in recent years, largely due to the rapid advancement of AI and cloud native. Communication Service Providers (CSPs), as key players in the global economy, are uniquely positioned to harness the transformative power of AI and finally return to profitable growth. Based on Accenture's 2025 Technology Vision, I'll shortly explore how generative and agentic AI are impacting the telecom industry – the opportunities, challenges and trends we are observing with our clients, and the industry at large.
Overcoming technical debt and building trust are critical considerations for telcos looking to realize AI’s full potential.
59% of telco executives admit that the widespread availability, easy access, and advanced functionality of today's AI provide CSPs with great potential for innovation and growth, but also the urgent need to reinvent. In fact, many CSPs are still struggling with legacy systems and technical debt with 56% of their IT costs being due to outdated systems, which limit their agility and raise operational expenses. Modernizing their digital core is now becoming essential to gain viability and agility, and therefore to fully leverage AI.
However, overcoming technical debt will not be enough. Strengthening customer trust is essential for driving business growth. Yet another recently published research found that telcos rank among the top three providers when it comes to consumer trust based on data security. But that trust is not matched by loyalty. That’s because trust is just one part of the loyalty equation—telcos across the industry are falling short on the other two: customer experience and engagement.
We see this with 82% of telco executives in our Technology Vision stating that prioritizing both a trust strategy and technology strategy is necessary.
When we hear AI and autonomy, the mind immediately jumps to agentic systems—AI that doesn’t just provide insight but can equally act upon that insight. CSPs are now empowered to leverage AI in groundbreaking ways with 84% of telco executives agreeing that AI agents will reinvent how their organizations are building and operating their digital infrastructures. For example, AI can be used to change the software development, create frictionless ecosystem management processes, deploy digital twins to optimize network performance, or revolutionize customer care workflows. Leading telcos are already leveraging these technologies to modernize their digital cores and drive efficiency and growth; BT Openreach's streamlined approach to building the UK's digital infrastructure has generated substantial savings over the past four years, allowing for significant reinvestment in growth. Other telco leaders, this time in Asia Pacific, are realizing that AI's transformative power extends far beyond internal efficiencies, offering them the chance to lead the sovereign AI era. While cloud held significant promise in the past, many telecom providers were slow to capitalize on its value, particularly in empowering customer digital transformations.
Sovereign AI offers another chance: to enhance their own operations and, more importantly, empower customers with secure, localized and trustable AI solutions, solidifying their role as essential partners in the new digital economy. For example, Indosat Group announced the first sovereign AI in Indonesia that enables businesses to securely deploy AI while ensuring data governance and adhering to regulations.
At Accenture we recognize AI's strategic importance for CSPs seeking profitable growth. Our recent partnership with NVIDIA combines Accenture's AI scaling frameworks and industry expertise with NVIDIA's AI software and accelerated computing. This empowers telcos to rapidly deploy secure, scalable generative AI, boosting productivity and improving business outcomes.
Leveraging AI is becoming a more prominent interface for customer interactions, CSPs can focus on personalization to foster engagement, create deeper emotional connections and loyalty by defining their AI personality. An astounding 99% of the telco executives surveyed state that establishing or maintaining a consistent personality will be (important / very important) to their customer-facing AI agents over the next 3 years. Personified AI, which integrates branding with autonomous agents, is the key to achieving this. 67% of telco executives are prioritizing personified AI for content and advertising management, with proactive care predicting and resolving issues before they even arise.
Vodafone, for example, is setting new industry standards with a generative AI chatbot for Gen Z, which delivers human-like, adaptive interactions.
VMO2's digital core, modernized and AI-powered, significantly improves customer experience, with tools like Genie and automated workflows empower agents, leading to faster, higher-quality support across multiple channels. This streamlined service has resulted in fewer complaints and increased same-day complaint resolution, boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Generalist robots are expected to emerge over the next decade, bringing more AI autonomy into the physical world, for example in optimization of supply chains and warehouse automation. 71% of telco executives agree their organization sees the promise of adaptable and intelligent robots, but 42% remain very attentive to the technical challenges that they could bring, such as network limitations or bandwidth constraints; Already, China Mobile* is actively advancing autonomous network technologies, including the use of AI-driven systems for network maintenance and operations.
AI is fostering a virtuous cycle of learning and innovation within organizations, aimed at sustaining effective and responsible AI adoption, with 76% of CSP executives reporting a need to upskill/reskill their employees in Gen AI tools and technologies, within the next 3 years and empowering them to automate processes, as well as helping them focus on strategic initiatives. By democratizing access to advanced technologies, CSPs can attract and retain top talent, a persistent challenge in a highly competitive market.
Telco leaders must prepare today for an imminent world in which AI is ubiquitous, powering networks, optimizing services, and even interacting autonomously with customers. Every telco has their own specificities, but here is the baseline roadmap: