- Lumen sees AI as an "amplifier," when it comes to building networks, preventing outages and communicating with customers
- The industry is moving away from a model where operators buy technology against a set of technical requirements and toward relationships organized around business results
- AI may be changing telecom technology, but one bigger disruption could be to the ecosystem built around it
FUTURENET NORTH AMERICA, NEW YORK CITY – AI may be changing telecom technology, but one bigger disruption could be to the ecosystem built around it, according to panelists at FutureNet North America.
Thanks to AI the industry is moving away from a model where operators buy technology against a set of technical requirements and toward relationships organized around business results, noted Gustavo Duarte, VP of sales, Americas, Etiya.
He used an example of a Canadian digital operator that wanted to use AI agents to lower call-center costs while improving first-call resolution. Instead of treating the project purely as a technology deployment, the work brought together IT, call-center operations and finance around specific KPIs, data quality and guardrails, he said.
"The way you engage with a partner is not only a vendor-customer relationship," it’s an open relationship among the companies involved, Duarte said.
Putting AI to work
Lumen, meanwhile, sees AI as an "amplifier," when it comes to building networks, preventing outages and communicating with customers. But that doesn't mean the company is prepared to hand over the network to autonomous agents, according to Greg Freeman, VP of network and customer transformation at the company.
"Am I going to allow a generative AI or agentic AI to go out and make changes on my network? I'm not," Freeman said. Instead, Lumen can allow AI agents to invoke deterministic workflows that have already been built and tested by engineers.
It is also experimenting with AI as a way to change how customers interact with the company. Freeman explained an agentic AI email system can run diagnostics and respond to customer questions in natural language, reducing the need for customers to navigate portals and traditional support processes.
Who captures the AI value?
Use cases aside the main question is whether AI simply becomes embedded in telecom services or turns into something operators can charge customers more for.
One risk is that the industry's rush to demonstrate its AI credentials could result in operators giving away capabilities customers might otherwise pay for. Productivity and insights have value, and operators may need tiered propositions that provide basic AI capabilities while reserving more sophisticated services for higher-value offerings, the panelists said.
That also puts pressure on operators to decide what business problem they are solving before deploying another AI tool. Indeed, simply attaching AI to an existing service doesn't create a new business model, said Ryan Tollofson, director of marketing and emerging services at Telus.
The companies that figure out where the measurable value sits, and how that value should be divided among operators, technology partners and customers, may have the real advantage, the panelists concluded.
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