Embracing AI: The Key to Driving Growth and Revenue in the Telecom Industry

The Benefits of AI Adoption

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology with a broad range of use cases that are transforming industries across the world’s economy. From infrastructure that “self-heals” to radically reimagined customer service and experience, from large-scale hyper-personalization to automatically created marketing messages and images, AI solutions can powerfully augment and sometimes radically outperform most traditional business roles.

According to a report by McKinsey, the top quintile of companies that have taken the McKinsey Analytics Quotient assessment and are AI leaders have experienced a five-year revenue Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) that is 2.1 times higher than that of peers and a total return to shareholders that is 2.5 times larger.

However, despite the many benefits of AI, the telecom industry has yet to fully embrace it. Instead, models are developed once and not enhanced as the business context evolves. AI investments are often not aligned with top-level management priorities, causing AI deployments to stall, investment in technical talent to wither, and the technology to remain immature.

Becoming an AI-Native Organization

To be competitive and drive growth and revenue, telcos need to embrace large-scale deployment of AI and transition to being AI-native organizations. An AI-native organization views AI as a core competency that powers decision-making across all departments and organizational layers. AI investments are required to enable most C-level priorities, and top executives serve as champions of critical AI initiatives. Data and AI capabilities are managed as products, built for scalability and reusability.

Telcos can take advantage of the increasing accessibility of leading AI technology, the rapid explosion of usable data, and the proven use cases and outcomes of AI-native organizations across industries. However, to answer privacy fears raised by consumers and regulators, telcos must also invest in building digital trust, including actively managing data privacy, having a robust cybersecurity & privacy strategy and a framework to guide ethical deployment of AI.

By embracing AI, telcos can drive revenue protection and growth through personalization, transform the cost structure, enable a frictionless customer experience and achieve personalization at scale. While isolated applications of the technology can help individual departments improve, it’s AI connected holistically at all levels and departments that will be key to protecting core revenue and driving margin growth in even the most difficult of environments.

Read the full McKinsey article ‘The AI-native telco: Radical transformation to thrive in turbulent times’ here. To learn more about our AI-driven products that drive revenues, enhance CX and deliver personalization at scale, click here.