Videos
Aria on Agentic AI, Customer Experience, and Trusted Telecom Transformation
Insights
- Trust, governance, and responsible AI adoption are becoming central priorities as agentic AI moves into production environments.
- Agentic AI can help telecom operators proactively resolve customer issues before they become support calls.
- AI-powered customer care is shifting from reactive problem solving to personalized recommendations and service optimization.
At MWC 2026, Jared Olkkola of Aria discusses how the conversation around AI in telecom is evolving from experimentation toward trusted, governed deployment at scale. He explains that alongside growing interest in agentic AI, operators are placing greater emphasis on governance, responsible use, and sovereign cloud strategies to ensure AI is deployed securely. The conversation highlights how agentic AI can transform customer experience by proactively identifying and resolving common issues such as billing concerns before customers need to contact support. Olkkola describes how agent-to-agent interactions can not only reduce operational costs and improve satisfaction but also create opportunities to recommend better plans and services that deliver more value to customers. Looking ahead, he sees AI enabling telecom providers to shift from reactive service models to proactive, personalized customer engagement.
Jared Olkkola:
Everybody seems to have dancing robots this year.
But on a more serious note, I think there's a lot more emphasis this year on not only agentic AI, but the trust and governance that goes around that and making sure that people are using AI in the right manner and not using it as a bad actor, so to speak. I think that's a key thing.
The other thing that kind of goes along with that is I see a lot of people talking about sovereign clouds, you know, extending beyond data sovereignty and looking at along with that trust and governance, this might be a way that we can pull back a little bit in some areas. So those are, some of the key things that I've seen and noticed here that weren't being talked about last year and are high on the list of subjects this year.
The number one cause for customers to contact a care center for CSP is a billing issue. And those are issues that are typically take longer to resolve and are more expensive for the carriers to have to resolve. So we're getting the customer shock eliminated before that happens and using A2A to not only resolve that but also upsell the customer or right size the customer onto a different plan and resolve that in an A2A manner before the customer ever digs the bill. There's a cost reduction, there's customer satisfaction, flipping the script and taking pain points for the customer and turning them into opportunities to delight your customers.
Think of a scenario where you're travelling, you forget to add your international plan. All of a sudden you get a high bill or you get a something like that, but instead of getting the high bill, you get a notification to say, hey, if you change to this or if you add this other thing, it will reduce your bill now, before we collect it on your credit card.
