Communications service providers (CSPs) face no shortage of business challenges. Declining revenues from core services, the need to continuously invest in infrastructure, and the emergence of new competitors have consistently increased pressure to attract new subscribers while minimizing churn.
In response to these market conditions, CSPs are attempting to differentiate themselves by redefining service experience and care. Many are deploying a variety of AI solutions in this effort, from customer facing chatbots, at the most basic level, to applications that monitor complex usage patterns and surface insights that inform the creation of deeply personalized service offerings.
While standalone AI solutions can certainly offer some improvements, the broader impacts are likely to be limited given that no single tool, vendor, or application has control of, or integration with, a business’s full inventory of back-office systems and data. When AI applications and agents are siloed, they are unable to collaborate to anticipate customer needs and address inquiries.
Agentic AI architectures change this equation by connecting disparate BSS components and individual AI agents, enabling them to interoperate seamlessly without human intervention, ultimately allowing CSPs to shift from passive to proactive care to meet expanding customer expectations.
Aria and its partners put this vision for a transformative, intelligent, agentic AI-powered BSS model into motion at TM Forum’s recent gathering of telecom industry leaders.
A proactive care experience powered by agentic AI
As part of TM Forum’s Catalyst program, Aria and a consortium of 10 CSPs and vendors, including Vodafone, Telecom Argentina, Verizon, Salesforce, Calvi and AWS, showcased how different AI agents across disparate domains of expertise could work together autonomously to proactively anticipate customer issues and reactively respond to inquiries quickly, accurately, and in a trustworthy manner.
The team demonstrated how a concierge AI agent operates in the background, tracking subscriber usage, network activity, and monitoring the customer journey. When an anomaly is detected, such as unusual account activity, or an inbound inquiry is received, the concierge agent analyzes the anomaly or request and activates an orchestration agent to determine which domain-specific agent is best placed to provide the required information. A billing-related issue, for example, would trigger an inquiry into Aria Billie Connect, Aria’s agentic AI platform that makes billing inquiries available to AI agents.
The agentic AI agents across the ecosystem coordinate and communicate with one another using natural language to find information and address the issue quickly and without human involvement. The agents can also use the data and insights about the subscriber to suggest recommendations for a more appropriate plan or offer a personalized service, pre-empting potential future inquiries and deepening loyalty.
Measurable outcomes, demonstrable results
Historically, CSPs have used APIs to stitch together various components of their technology architecture. However, building API connectors requires extensive coding and they are typically only able to address very specific questions or narrow requests.
The catalyst project, on the other hand, successfully demonstrated how an agentic AI-powered ecosystem can leverage the unstructured, adaptable, and agile nature of AI to allow applications to speak to each other in a conversational, back-and-forth manner to deliver measurable outcomes.
CSPs that embrace an agentic AI back-office model can expect to see a 50-70% reduction in incoming call center inquiries relating to billing, as well as a 15% reduction in operating costs, a 15-25% reduction in churn rates, and a 5% revenue uplift from improved upsell and cross-sell. See our blog post on how GenAI can increase EBITDA by 31-57%.
Not just for telecom
Aria and its partners revealed the future of customer care in the telco industry, one where AI unites vendors across domains to collaboratively address challenges both proactively and reactively. The extraordinary success of the initiative was recognized by TM Forum with a Best Moonshot Catalyst Award for its interactive showcase and innovation.
But this intelligent, interoperable ecosystem is not limited to CSPs and the telco sector. Any organization in any industry using large language models and open-source AI protocols like Anthropic’s MCP and Google’s A2A can deploy this model to interconnect multiple systems, from billing and CRM to ERP and service management, via their AI agents to enhance customer experiences and journeys. In fact, any AI agent designed to support AI-to-AI interoperability can participate in the ecosystem.
Aria’s catalyst project didn’t just show how to improve customer care, it completely transforms and redefines how companies can operate by harnessing the power of agentic AI to proactively monitor services and optimize interactions with customers, enhancing loyalty and accelerating business growth.
Learn more about the catalyst project
