AI-driven customer experience should become telecom’s next competitive advantage
As Australia’s telecom sector grows its investments in AI, customer experience is emerging as a growing priority. Harshvendra Soin, President for Asia Pacific and Japan at Tech Mahindra, outlines why the focus is on ensuring AI investments deliver improvements that address long-standing customer frustrations and create valuable experiences for people.
The Australian telecommunications industry has reached a pivotal moment in its AI journey. While operators have embraced AI adoption, customer experience remains one of the sector’s most persistent challenges.
As telecom offerings become increasingly comparable, customer experience is emerging as one of the few areas where operators can still build meaningful differentiation.
For decades, telecommunications providers have competed on network performance and price. These factors remain important, but they are no longer enough to create lasting differentiation in mature markets, such as Australia and New Zealand.
Customers now expect reliable services to work seamlessly at a competitive price. What increasingly shapes their perception of a telco provider is the experience they receive when they need support. Customers remember when their issue is resolved quickly and seamlessly, and they also remember endless transfers, repeating the same information across channels and waiting days for a simple issue to be fixed.
These experiences can shape how customers view and trust their provider. As traditional points of differentiation narrow, customer experience will become one of the most important ways operators build loyalty, advocacy and long-term value, with AI acting as a critical enabler.
Embedding AI to solve customer problems
Operators are increasingly looking at how AI can improve their understanding of customers and their needs. The reality is that AI itself is unlikely to remain a source of competitive advantage for long. Across the Asia-Pacific, operators have largely moved beyond debating the merits of AI adoption. That means the focus now needs to shift towards ensuring these AI investments solve real customer problems and deliver outcomes that customers genuinely value.
In my experience, operators across Asia-Pacific are now confronting the realities of scaling AI. Many are progressing from proofs of concept to enterprise-wide deployments across customer service, network operations, workforce management and business processes. However, scaling AI is also exposing a reality many operators are now confronting.
Most large operators are running on systems that were never designed to communicate with one another, with customer data fragmented across product lines, channels, and business units. This is a challenge we see playing out directly in our work across the region. When a leading Australian telecommunications provider migrated to a unified data platform in partnership with Tech Mahindra, Microsoft, and Databricks, the first of its kind in Asia Pacific, the ambition went well beyond operational efficiency.
A unified data foundation is what makes personalisation at scale genuinely possible, and without it, AI investments will continue to underperform against expectations. The operators that get this right will be much better at retaining customers and making more effective use of the data they already hold.
Focus must be on meaningful outcomes
Telecommunications leaders should be clear about what they want AI to achieve. Across Asia-Pacific, the market is not moving uniformly, and that divergence will continue to accelerate. Operators less burdened by legacy complexity are already running AI across customer-facing workflows in ways that are measurably changing satisfaction outcomes.
For established operators who are taking a wait-and-see approach, waiting much longer may become increasingly difficult to justify.
Eventually, every operator will have access to similar AI capabilities, and the technology itself will not be enough to make different telecom brands stand apart. What will differentiate operators is how effectively they use AI to make life easier for their customers and employees.
Looking ahead
Customers’ experiences will increasingly influence which telco operators they choose to stay with. AI can play an important role, but its value will ultimately come down to whether customers notice an improvement in the service they receive. That could be as simple as resolving an issue faster or making sure customers do not have to repeat themselves every time they ask for help.
