How Agentic AI Turbocharges Telco Customer Experiences

Generative AI adoption continues to pick up traction across global industries. Count telecommunications professionals as among those enthusiastic about using the content generation technology to augment their most critical business operations. Telcos globally serve more than 5 billion customers, and handle millions of customer care calls daily, creating a perfect opportunity for AI to shine.

Sixty percent of over 450 telecommunications professionals said increased employee productivity was the biggest benefit of AI, while 44% of respondents cited investing in AI for customer experience optimization, according to NVIDIA research. 

This makes sense when you consider that generative AI can rapidly retrieve domain-specific information for customers seeking assistance. 

Helping customers access information more efficiently improves service, which can bolster brand loyalty and ensure that the growth flywheel keeps spinning. 

Why Agentic Assistants Surpass Traditional AI Chatbots

Telco service providers have been using various flavors of AI chatbots to assist customers for years. Yet the conversational nature of generative and agentic AI makes it more dynamic and efficient. 

Lilac Ilan, Global Head of Business Development, AI-Powered Operations at NVIDIA, shared her insight, “AI in telco isn’t new—but Agentic AI powered assistants are a game-changer. We’ve gone from static scripts to smart agents that think, reason, and evolve. Helping telcos drive proactive customer experience, higher NPS score and lower operating cost.”

1. Rule Followers Vs. Contextual Approach. Traditional AI chatbots follow pre-defined decision trees and keyword matching, meaning the conversations they conduct with customers tend to be narrow. Their agentic counterparts will incorporate natural language and deep contextual understanding, which can facilitate a more natural conversation between the AI agent and customers. And if escalation is required, the digital agent can provide human agents critical information and draft responses intended to better assist customers. This collaboration also ensures that a human remains in the loop to validate information the AI Agent produces. It’s customer service, with good governance and sound security.

2. Problem Resolution. Traditional AI chatbots are programmed to address anticipated problems. But agentic AI can work through novel problems, bringing their wealth of contextual knowledge, and recommend solutions to bear on unique customer issues. For example, traditional AI chatbots can struggle with multi-part problems, and if they hit a wall they must escalate to human agents. AI agents are better at managing multi-faceted problems across different service aspects within a single conversation. AI agents work in teams to deliver outcomes and complete a task, rather than a part of it. Thanks to growing LLM reasoning capabilities, some experts think that generative AI systems can achieve vastly higher resolution rates for customer service inquiries versus traditional AI chatbots, especially when paired with human agents. The business outcome is much higher first call resolution rates.

3. Technical Support Quality. Traditional AI is limited to troubleshooting scripts and requires manual updates to knowledge bases and decision trees. Conversely, agentic AI can provide detailed prescriptive technical guidance for device-specific issues, network configurations and connectivity problems. As for upgrades, because LLMs can learn more from each interaction and can be fine-tuned on specific data sets, they can continuously improve without explicit reprogramming. Of course, telco providers’ mileage will vary here, as technologies are constantly evolving. 

4. The Innovation Advantage. While traditional chatbots have largely plateaued in terms of their capabilities, AI assistants continue to evolve. Today’s LLMs provide customers personalized product recommendations using text, images, voice and video, while predicting and proactively addressing customer service problems before they arise. They also continuously improve internal documentation and support based on customer interactions while offering customer service in multiple languages. 

Scaling AI Agents Beyond Customer Service 

Thanks to their human-like understanding of triaging problems, generative AI systems represent a category shift in automated customer service. And if the targeted outcome is preserving customer loyalty, the approach LLMs offer should become the new norm for telcos.

Even so, while some telcos are contemplating how to swap out or complement their AI chatbots for LLM assistants, others are preparing for a future that is even more fueled by software. 

Yes, the era of AI agents that can sense, process, understand, and react to the world around them to achieve goals is here. NVIDIA, for example, is working with telco providers to build specialized language models trained on network data and network AI agents, that can transform network operations, helping internal network and field teams predict, plan and fix network issues before customers experience any problems

It's only a matter of time before AI agents find their way into the reference architectures of business and network support systems to solve high frequency problems on their own or pass more complex issues along to human agents.

Whether they are looking to swap out existing chatbots for LLM digital assistants or deploy AI agents, most telco providers must modernize their infrastructure to unlock next-level innovation.

Fortunately, Dell and NVIDIA have built just the thing: the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA comprises a solution suite and framework for organizations seeking to launch and scale AI systems. The Dell AI Factory includes NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform, software and networking with Dell servers, storage, and professional services that provide a consultative approach to deploying AI.

 “Telco operations offer a perfect use-case for agentic AI, given the scale and complexity of customer and network data they deal with every day,” Illan said. “NVIDIA, Dell and various ecosystem partners are accelerating the path from AI chatbots to AI agents with new platforms, solutions and demonstrating real business outcomes with leading telcos globally.”

Today telcos have AI-fueled, world-class customer service innovation at their disposal. But they must partner with trusted advisers possessing the right expertise as well as the connections to the growing, open AI ecosystem.

Learn more about the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA here.