As broadband services become increasingly commoditized, ISPs are facing mounting pressure to differentiate beyond speed and price. Customer experience is emerging as the key battleground. By leveraging AI-driven intelligence, service providers can gain real-time visibility into network performance and subscriber behavior, allowing them to anticipate issues before they impact users.
This proactive approach helps ensure consistent, high-quality connectivity while reducing friction in the customer journey.
AI is also reshaping how ISPs engage with subscribers through digital care and support. Automated workflows, voice assistants, and chatbots enable faster issue resolution while maintaining a seamless and intuitive experience. At the same time, flexible cloud and hardware environments give providers greater control over their ecosystems. As AI evolves from simply delivering insights to actively orchestrating solutions, ISPs have an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships and unlock new growth by focusing on experience over transactions.
Steve Saunders:
Hey, Dan.
Daniel Herscovici:
Hey, nice to see you.
Steve Saunders:
Nice to see you. Plume helped really define this managed wifi market, but it's getting crowded now. And the ISPs that you're helping with this service, they have new challenges as well. How are you re-imagining Plume as it were to stay relevant in 2026?
Daniel Herscovici:
Plume has become and will continue to evolve into a customer experience platform. The platform that ISPs use to help define, improve, and control the subscriber experience. They're faced with the biggest challenges they've had in a decade. Speed and price are commoditized. And what we believe here at Plume is that customer experience is the differentiator that will separate the best from the rest.
Steve Saunders:
You're already managing 500 million devices for 450 ISPs. So where's the growth going to come from?
Daniel Herscovici:
Our growth will come from adding ISPs to our portfolio and expanding within existing ISPs. Not every subscriber in every ISP is using Plume in their home, and we're unlocking that for everybody.
Steve Saunders:
You're privileged in a way because you get to see all of the data, right? And now, I don't know if you've heard about this thing, AI.
Daniel Herscovici:
I've heard a bit about it.
Steve Saunders:
If you take all of that information about the subscriber data and feed it into AI, that could be pretty powerful, right? Over half a billion devices. Is that what you're doing? And what sort of benefits are you getting from that?
Daniel Herscovici:
If you think about the power of AI and what we do, it breaks down into two key pillars. One is intelligence and then orchestration. Intelligence drives the information, the knowledge, the understanding of what's going on in real time and what to do next. The key part is orchestration and taking that action. AI needs to move from answering questions to solving problems, and that's the connection that we are making.
Steve Saunders:
Is this something which is invisible to the consumer in terms of the benefits which are being delivered?
Daniel Herscovici:
We understand that the end application is slowly degrading before the consumer does. And we can take proactive interventions on behalf of the consumer to ensure that it never falls below a threshold that the consumer might notice a degradation in experience. So in that way, it's invisible to the consumer. It is visible to the consumer mostly around customer support and digital care. We do that with AI-driven digital workflows. So when a consumer calls, they may be interacting with an AI voice assistant or a chatbot that has a conversational fluidity and an ability to interact with them as a human might, but they are walking them through a workflow to solve their problem.
Steve Saunders:
What about the flip side of that on the cloud side? Is it just an AWS compatible specification or can customers also jump onto other cloud networks?
Daniel Herscovici:
So our goal is to allow the ISP from a hardware perspective to choose the OS they prefer and therefore the hardware vendor that they prefer and actually have a mixed hardware environment so they have the ultimate choice in their ecosystem. On the cloud side, we work across AWS, GCP, and we've got active deployments in both. So once again, our mission is to give the ISP choice and solve the problem, meet them where their needs are, as opposed to dictating to them how the problem should be solved.
Steve Saunders:
Tell me about the Sweeper acquisition.
Daniel Herscovici:
I talked a little bit before about intelligence and orchestration. Sweeper brings orchestration, or another way to think about it is Sweeper brings action. That intelligence platform then translates into Sweeper's orchestration platform, which allows us to turn the knobs, take the action, or direct the consumer to take the action.
Steve Saunders:
I mean, you've talked publicly about the importance of ISPs moving beyond a sort of transactional relationship. What do you think they're doing now that they should stop doing?
Daniel Herscovici:
I think ISPs need to move from being construction managers to relationship managers. Their job is to create a deep and tight relationship with the consumer. The consumer expects always on, flawless, reliable connectivity. Inevitably, something either will go wrong or the consumer will have a question or attempt to interact with their internet service. Tackling that issue quickly in the way that a consumer wants it solved, which oftentimes means not talking to another human, but solving the problem quickly and seamlessly, that's where the focus needs to lie.