- DT hosted its AI Investor Day in Bonn, Germany, to discuss opportunities in artificial intelligence
- T-Mobile served as its U.S. proof point for AI, with executives sharing customer service and network-based AI achievements
- Analysts want to know: Is there room for more collaboration between the two entities?
Deutsche Telekom (DT) devoted an entire day on Monday to tell investors how it’s using AI to conquer the world and its shiny U.S. entity T-Mobile is a key part of that strategy.
Never mind that DT wants to take full control of T-Mobile. That proposal, which reportedly somewhat fizzled over the summer, wasn’t on the agenda. Instead, DT gave its U.S. entity a chunk of time near the end (thankfully, since the day started around 3:15 a.m. for its Seattle-based cohorts) to talk about all things AI.
They had a lot to talk about. T-Mobile COO Jon Freier kicked it off on a high note when he explained how T-Mobile’s ambitious target of reducing human-handled customer care calls by 75% by the end of 2027 is making real progress.
To wit: It’s already reduced customer service calls handled by humans by 55% and AI agents are now handling 40% of customer contacts. (No word on where the human employees ended up.)
The star of this segment was IntentCX, the platform developed in partnership with OpenAI and built on the experiences of real call center agents. T-Mobile is seeing more satisfaction with calls handled by IntentCX compared to when they first started using it, Freier said.
IntentCX was built so that customers could experience AI in every channel regardless of where they choose to interact with T-Mobile.
“Whether they come to our flagship T-Life app, they’re on our website, they call into our call center or they meet us in the store, IntentCX will be there to help empower their journey,” said T-Mobile Chief Information Officer Jeff Simon. “It’s also integrated into all of our systems and transaction types.”
To accomplish this journey, however, they had to change how they work. “We changed our workforce from a largely outsourced third-party workforce … into now a predominantly T-Mobile-led workforce in software engineering, building on T-Mobile-owned technology that’s been built in the AI era and for the AI era,” Simon said.
According to Simon, customers are loving the experience. They’re getting their questions answered faster and without any human interaction.
But for customers who prefer to talk to a real person, T-Mobile offers Expert Assist to give frontline employees the “superpowers” to figure out why a customer arrives in a store and “solve their problem before they even ask,” he said.
It bears noting that no one talked about everyone’s favorite topic: the number of employees that are being displaced by AI, which would seem to be significant judging by the number of layoffs.
The financial stakes are substantial. DT said it expects to save about $2.8 billion in indirect costs by 2030 compared with 2023 through AI and automation.
T-Mobile’s AI and the network
T-Mobile President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer John Saw discussed how they’re using AI at scale in the network to augment its self-organizing network (SON) capabilities and make adjustments to sites during natural disasters, like this past January’s historic Winter Storm Fern.
T-Mobile’s network made more than 30,000 antenna adjustments to keep customers connected – which would not have been possible using humans. T-Mobile also used SON to adaptively reduce power usage at cell sites to extend the battery backup by more than 250,000 minutes during the storm.
It paid off, with 68% of T-Mobile customers reconnecting to their service within the first hour and 98% of them reconnecting in the first eight hours. “Most of them got their T-Mobile service back before they got power back,” Saw noted.
He also discussed the Live Translation service that uses an agentic AI platform in its IMS network to offer live language translation services, as well as T-Mobile’s recently expanded Dynamic CX, which uses AI to anticipate network demands and make adjustments to provide enough capacity.
Physical AI is the next big frontier. “We believe that our network will be the connective tissue for physical AI and AI wearables,” he said. “It will be part of the intelligent fabric that connects physical AI devices, data centers and the network edge.”
6G is AI native by design and to T-Mobile, “6G is not just the next G. It is a generational opportunity for the transformation of the telecom sector, enabled by the perfect storm of AI, wireless and efficient computing,” he said.
Greater collaboration between DT, T-Mobile?
Circling back to how the European and U.S. parts of the companies can further combine their skills, the executives were asked during the Q&A to what extent DT and its U.S. arm can collaborate given the regulatory and legal differences between the U.S. and Europe.
DT and T-Mobile already collaborate in a number of ways, such as the T Challenge, where T-Mobile US and DT teams participate in an event akin to a hackathon where they reward contestants with cash and the ability to roll out their products at both T-Mobile and DT.
At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, they announced the creation of a joint 6G Innovation Lab based in Berlin and Bellevue, Washington, to work on 6G use cases together, such as sensing.
In addition, “both engineering teams are working closely to influence the 6G standards to drive priorities” that they believe are needed for a more customer-centric experience with 6G, Saw said.
Is DT leading the pack?
How much is DT leading the industry in AI? That’s hard to tell.
DT gets credit for hosting the first major European telecom AI investor day, a feat that earns them kudos from the likes of New Street Research analyst James Ratzer.
“Given that DT was taking the sector lead in promoting AI through a dedicated AI investor day, they should be given a lot of credit for taking the initiative here. What came across strongly was the internal focus that they put on AI culture across the whole organization – throughout B2C, B2B and network functionality – and also across all of their geographical business units, including T-Mobile USA,” Ratzer said in a note to investors.
“As an external observer and given that a lot of the presentational material was effectively a PR exercise, it is always very hard to be definitive that they are doing is genuinely industry leading and differentiated compared to other telecoms operators – but given the presentation they gave and given the scale advantage that they have across Europe and the U.S., we think it could be hard for any other telco to match the scope of their AI intentions,” he concluded.
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