Unlocking the power of AI to improve customer experience

Operators are accelerating their AI investments to automate and enhance the entire customer experience lifecycle. Operators expect their investments in AI and automation will lead to significant cost reductions in the next 2 years due to operational efficiency, customer experience improvements and business/revenue growth. However, most projects struggle to achieve meaningful return on investment (ROI), and only a low percentage of proofs of concept (PoCs) move into live deployments.

This failure is often rooted in the architectural choices that operators make. Operators overwhelmingly favor a multi-vendor approach, yet this reliance on fragmented, multi-vendor solutions requires complex, proprietary integration layers, thus leading to high development and maintenance costs and, critically, low ROI. This problem is further compounded by internal misalignment: the overall organization will often express a preference for multi-vendor flexibility, but CIOs (the leaders often responsible for core IT infrastructure) tend to show a strong counter-preference for single-vendor platforms, resulting in significant internal tensions. Operators must reconcile their desire for architectural flexibility with the operational and financial realities of multi-vendor integration if they are to capture the full value of AI.

This report outlines operators’ progress in their AI and automation initiatives for customer experience lifecycle management, as well as their priorities and challenges. It draws on data from a survey of 100 operators worldwide to quantify the cost and success rates of current automation and AI initiatives.