How Australia’s telcos can boost productivity by approaching AI as an employee

According to a recent Stanford University article, media stories about artificial intelligence (AI) and work fall into four main categories. Ask your favourite generative AI chatbot for a quick multimedia search and it will show that the stories people generally tell about AI include:

1. AI and productivity,
2. the complexity of AI,
3. the risks around AI, or
4. will AI regulation stifle innovation?

But what if there’s a valuable fifth way of thinking about AI and work? That is, what if we were to think about AI as an employee?

Recently, I’ve had several conversations with telco leaders where it’s been universally agreed that there are huge opportunities for the sector when it comes to AI. And yet AI fluency still has a way to go, meaning there’s untapped value being left on the table.

Currently, Australia’s telcos are mostly using AI to empower individuals (think Q&A dialogues or summaries). This boosts an individual’s productivity or efficiency on standard tasks, freeing them up for more strategic thinking, and can add around 10% in productivity uplift. Further along the AI maturity curve, we’re seeing some telcos incorporating AI across a number of solutions, native or custom, in areas such as the finance function to create efficiencies and streamline knowledge sharing. This can nudge productivity up by 20-40%. 

But where things really start to get interesting is where telcos are weaving AI into the very fabric of the organisation, creating a network of interconnected agents and automating processes across multiple functions. Here, we’re seeing enterprise-wide efficiency gains, better resource allocation and issue resolution, and productivity increase by 60%.

For those telcos that have not yet embedded AI to this extent, where do you start?

The key to the first step is to stop thinking about AI as a tool and to start thinking about AI as an employee (albeit a digital one). When considering onboarding AI, just as you would during any hiring process, ask yourself: Why are we onboarding? What does best-practice onboarding involve? Is this new role set up for success? 

Back in 2023, when we first started to integrate AI into our workforce at PwC, we quickly became aware that the existing standards and regulations governing an employee (such as governance rules, data privacy rules etc.) were equally relevant to AI applications. There are ‘real’ laws for artificial intelligence, and so we extended some and established additional governance and risk management measures for AI.  We also put in place a practice of reviewing our ‘AI employees’ for continual improvement in the same way that we review and upskill our human employees.

Thinking of AI-powered applications as ‘AI employees’ is especially valuable for telcos because the sector is so data-rich. Take customer feedback management for example. The sheer volume of customer engagement that telcos face is enormous, and complaints must be handled in a way that satisfies consumer expectations and meets industry regulations. What better way to do this than to put your ‘AI employee’ on the job? AI Agents, leveraging GenAI models and more, can sift through massive volumes of data faster and more effectively than humans, meaning AI is an invaluable way to improve the customer experience.

In the case of AI-powered customer journeys in telcos, you could establish a number of AI agents, e.g. a complaints detective, a complaints Subject Matter Expert, and a complaints triage agent. That way, as customer feedback comes in, the agents can instantly identify which are complaints, before triaging them and directing them to the right team to be resolved as fast as possible. In addition to these agents working autonomously, you can reach out to your ‘AI employee’ with questions at any point in the process, just as you could tap a human employee on the shoulder and ask about the nature of complaints on any given day.

In short, it’s time to start viewing AI as more than just a tool to achieve marginal gains. When you approach AI like a new hire – guiding it towards its full potential – the gains can be exponential.