Videos
Google on Customer Experience, Autonomous Networks, and Agentic AI
Insights
- Customer experience remains a major opportunity for telecom operators, with AI helping create more personalized and effective customer interactions.
- Autonomous networks are emerging as a key AI use case, combining cloud, data, and intelligence to improve network operations and business outcomes.
- Agentic AI is enabling organizations to build custom agents grounded in enterprise data, accelerating productivity and innovation.
At MWC 2026, Frank Rhoades of Google and Rahul Kulkarni of Infosys discuss how AI is reshaping the telecom industry across customer experience, network operations, and enterprise productivity. They explain how telecom providers are using AI to improve customer engagement, strengthen brand loyalty, and create more meaningful interactions throughout the customer journey. The conversation also highlights the growing momentum behind autonomous networks, where Google’s AI and cloud capabilities combine with Infosys’ telecom expertise to deliver operational efficiencies and measurable business outcomes. Rhoades shares his perspective on Gemini and the growing role of enterprise AI agents that can be grounded in organizational data and customized for specific business needs. Looking ahead, they argue that the combination of AI, cloud, and industry expertise will help telecom operators unlock new revenue opportunities, improve customer relationships, and accelerate their transition toward the Frontier Telco vision.
Frank Rhoades:
We've been very active in our US telco presence, especially around the customer experience and providing a platform that allows the telcos to interact with their customers in a meaningful way. Telcos don't have necessarily the highest NPS scores out there and the highest brand reputations for customer service. And we've been helping them come a long way in improving that journey.
Samad Masood:
Rahul, what do you see Google bringing to telcos?
Rahul Kulkarni:
So Google brings a lot of things to the table when it comes to telco. We’ve talked about customer experience, but if I think about it, where we as Infosys are involved with them, of course, we do a lot of projects for them for customer experience in two, three of our clients, telco, North American. In addition to that, we do a lot of data and AI work, agentic AI and now we are co-creating autonomous network solutions along with them. So the industry solution that they have when it comes to autonomous networks is by far the best in my opinion.
Rahul Kulkarni:
As I talked about autonomous networking, right? We are developing it on Google platform, and we are going together to the client. So the client sees value in both of these organizations coming together as a joint proposition rather than Infosys going on its own or Google going on its own. So the force of the industry solution, the AI expertise, the cloud expertise is what makes it as a value proposition with business outcomes.
Frank Rhoades:
Yes, agentic is going to change things, but you have to know in that telco when you're making that change, how’s it going to impact them? Who are the players? How are they going to feel? What's the landscape in the organization? And Infosys brings a lot of cultural knowledge and customer knowledge into those conversations.
Samad Masood:
Frank, tell me a bit about Gemini.
Frank Rhoades:
So for us, Gemini obviously is our large language model and it's being applied through for developers, they use it through Vertex to build custom solutions for the organizations, which we're seeing a lot of momentum up. But the one that really personally excites me the most is Gemini Enterprise, which is an application or applied AI that sits on top and the end users are usually knowledge workers. And so Gemini Enterprise does a lot which you would, some of which you would see as a consumer, but then many additional use cases. And it requires connectivity into your data stack inside the organization so that it can be, so that Gemini can be grounded on your data. It’s also an ability to create your own agents or to leverage agents that others have built. And so we see so much creativity in the agents that are being developed by organizations. But we know partners like Infosys who have that knowledge of the organization both horizontally and vertically have a great opportunity to build for their customers within Gemini Enterprise.
Frank Rhoades:
Google and Infosys together can be great partners in the Frontier Telco. That would help the telco community really improve their customer relations and drive efficiencies through the network and be able then to translate that into new offers which create new revenue streams for our telco customers.
