In the agentic era, Amdocs and Microsoft redefine the telco experience, engineering an intelligent platform with GenAI that ‘speaks telecom’s language.’
Communication Service Providers (CSPs) in the telecom industry face growing pressure to modernize legacy systems and transform operations, all while reducing complexity and dramatically improving customer experiences. This has driven many organizations to move to digital-first strategies, driven by customer demand for personalization and simplicity.
AI and generative AI (GenAI) play a key role in this transformation, reshaping operations and engagement, including improved customer service, efficient network optimization and predictive maintenance. However, adoption is still in the early stages: In 2024, just about 2 in 10 telcos said they were using digitization to radically change their business, according to a recent EY survey.
New Age of Autonomous-Driven Decision-Making
The rapid pace of GenAI development has ushered in the “agentic” era, where AI systems seamlessly gather data, analyze it and execute multi-step processes autonomously. In this new world, CSPs now can optimize their customer service, e-commerce and ordering journeys and all other interactions in between, using “virtual” enterprise agents to deliver proactive, personalized and effortless service and support across the entire customer lifecycle.
Looking to aid telcos in making this transition, Amdocs is bringing AI and GenAI-powered capabilities, jointly engineered with Microsoft, into the new agentic era with the Customer Engagement Platform.
“We've reached a point in the GenAI era where customer experience is absolutely the driver in telecom – and the driver of revenue,” says Mustafa Oyumi, Digital Customer Experience lead for Amdocs.
At a time when the telecom industry’s growth rate is slowing, efficiency and driving new revenues is “the name of the game,” explains Oyumi. He emphasizes that keeping telecom customers happy through personalized customer experiences and product/service offers can directly influence their longevity and loyalty.
A Powerful, Strategic Telco Partnership
As partners, Microsoft and Amdocs bring a holistic, unified solution that delivers a personalized customer experience, whether serving consumers, business customers or small businesses.
Oyumi says Microsoft brings three powerful advantages to the partnership, beginning with collaboration tools (Microsoft® Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Teams) that dominate how telcos engage with customers. Second, the firm’s early investment in GenAI places it “at least two years ahead of the competition,” he notes. Finally, Microsoft is unique in providing a single, unified platform for marketing, sales, customer service, customer engagement, collaboration and productivity tools. The seamless addition of Amdocs Catalog, CPQ, Amdocs Commerce & Amdocs Ordering as well as billing care delivers a unique platform for telecom operators in the GenAI era.
“The strategic partnership with Microsoft allows us to bring a game-changing, unified, telco-specific platform that is infused with GenAI/AI as well as collaboration and productivity tools,” he says. “With a single data repository feeding into different components and channels... you’re now in a position to apply GenAI and AI and create highly personalized experiences for your customers.”
In addition to telco verticalization, and embedding key enterprise applications, Amdocs is bringing Microsoft Copilot together with its own GenAI platform, known as the Amdocs amAIz Suite. The idea is to create telecom-specific capabilities within the Customer Engagement Platform.
“Copilot is now telecom-smart – once you combine Copilot with our GenAI platform, it speaks telecom’s language,” Oyumi notes.
The Next Level of Customer Engagement With Agentic AI
The combined Microsoft and Amdocs solution enables agentic AI; that is, virtual GenAI agents that can deliver exceptional user and customer experiences while also communicating across functions. On the back end, the agents ensure the telco is capturing a holistic view of a customer.
The Customer Engagement Platform includes cross-domain data and ready-to-use use cases. Because it features both Microsoft Copilot and Amdocs’ amAIz suite, the platform delivers a cohesive AI experience to provide users with proactive recommendations and tailored customer interactions.
In the agentic world, a voice-enabled, avatar-driven ordering flow involves a virtual agent walking customers through their plan options in real time, based on all of the information the telco has about that customer’s usage and journey so far. In comparison, the traditional ordering process today involves customers going to a website and filling out forms.
“This is the next level of customer engagement, where you can just have a conversation with a GenAI agent; it feels like I’m talking to someone who knows me,” Oyumi says.
Citing an example of Amdocs’ product catalog solution, Oyumi says a simple conversation with a catalog agent can allow telcos to create complex, tailored telecom bundles for customers. This new way of engaging with customers transforms the buying process into a simpler but more loyalty-inducing affair.
“From a telecom operator’s point of view, it removes buying friction,” he explains. “From a customer’s point of view, it’s really a good experience because you feel your operator knows you and is giving you a very personalized offer, tailored just for you.”
The same connection occurs with customer service applications, where virtual agents walk customers through a resolution process. This personalized approach, according to Amdocs, can profoundly change how customers feel about their telecom provider.
Digital Transformation at the Right Pace
Microsoft and Amdocs’ combined R&D expertise has resulted in revolutionary capabilities for the Customer Engagement Platform. Featuring built-in AI agents, including Microsoft® Copilot and the Amdocs amAIz Suite, it enables CSPs to provide their customers with simple, digital-native, GenAI-driven intuitive experiences. This all-in-one, integrated solution serves telcos’ consumer and enterprise customers across any channel and line of business, leading to better customer experiences and new, faster revenue streams.
That said, telcos don’t need to adopt it all at once. Yaniv Sahar, General Manager and Head of Digital at Amdocs Technology, said in a recent industry interview:
“A key area of focus is agentic AI, which refers to AI systems capable of independently gathering data, reasoning and executing multi-step processes autonomously. These agents can collaborate with human agents seamlessly, enabling handovers between AI and humans when needed. We’ve developed AI agents with specific expertise, such as sales, billing and care. Over time, these will evolve into super-agents capable of orchestrating outcomes across domains, far surpassing human capabilities in terms of knowledge, speed and expertise.”
For instance, Philippines-based PLDT selected Amdocs and Microsoft’s platform for its own digital transformation journey. The leading broadband service provider in the Philippines, with nearly 58 million mobile and prepaid subscribers, will use the platform to modernize, unify, orchestrate and automate its network operations on the public cloud. The goal is to drive growth and agility while enhancing the customer experience.
Smart Communications, a wireless subsidiary of PLDT, is one of the early adopters of the platform. “We are excited to deepen our collaboration with Amdocs as we transform our network operations and deliver customer experiences that set a new standard of excellence," stated Gilbert Gaw, FVP and head of IT and the Transformation Office at the PLDT subsidiary.
Innovation-Ready Platform for Telcos
Under the hood, the Customer Engagement Platform offers purpose-built tools for telcos, like CPQ Pro, Amdocs’ AI-optimized integrated order and fulfillment tool for streamlined operations. It also supports the entire sales cycle, from lead to post-purchase care, with seamless integration across e-commerce, order management, marketing and customer care operations, and pre-integrated components to support end-to-end, omnichannel journeys.
The cloud-native platform also offers the scalability needed to handle large volumes of data, which can come in through various touchpoints, such as billing and network usage monitoring.
“GenAI really makes the human agents a lot smarter and a lot more enabled than before because the way we’ve designed our GenAI platform, it is LLM (Large Language Model)-agnostic,” explains Oyumi, adding that it can query multiple sources and then curate an answer for the user.
Telcos can build their own use cases or choose out-of-the-box ones for billing care, customer service, ordering, or ordering integration. The platform was engineered with low-code technology, which allows CSPs to create new applications and services with pre-built components and readily available integrations. Its modular design also gives CSPs the ability to quickly deploy new services or updates, ensuring consistent customer interactions and enhancing loyalty.
“Telcos are only limited by their imagination,” Oyumi says.
The Customer Engagement Platform with Copilot: Learn More
Amdocs’ powerful solution, enabled with Microsoft, has already generated external validation: global analyst and consulting firm Omdia, which is part of Informa, recently named Amdocs the top-ranked vendor in telco CX in its Market Radar: Consumer Engagement Omnichannel Solutions for Telcos report. Amdocs also was the only vendor to achieve Advanced Capability in every category, with Omdia highlighting the company’s “complete telco-specific CRM solution.”
Learn more about the unique capabilities of the Customer Engagement Platform at https://www.amdocs.com/products-services/customer-engagement-platform.