Why customer experience is becoming telecoms' clearest differentiator

“The battleground has shifted,” Cary told Capacity. “Today, customer experience is becoming the clearest point of differentiation, and in many cases, the most important driver of growth.”

That shift is unfolding at a difficult moment for the industry. Providers are navigating slower revenue growth, increasing pressure to improve returns on major infrastructure investments, and rising costs to acquire and retain customers, Cary said, while customer expectations continue to climb regardless of channel.

“They do not compare a telecom provider only to other providers,” she said. “They compare every experience to the best experience they have anywhere.”

In a recent Analysys Mason survey, 97% of operators said a high degree of AI-powered automation is essential for survival and growth over the next five years, Cary noted.

Moving toward autonomous customer experience

Cary said most of the systems and operating models providers rely on today were not built for the level of speed, intelligence or coordination now required. Many organisations still depend on fragmented data, disconnected workflows and engagement models that remain largely reactive, she said, marketing that is campaign-based and episodic, sales that depend on static segments, and service that focuses on resolving problems after they happen rather than preventing them.

This is where Cary sees the industry moving toward what she calls “autonomous customer experience.”

“It is not about removing the human element from engagement,” she explained. “It is about using AI to continuously orchestrate the customer lifecycle in ways that humans alone cannot manage at scale.”

That means shifting from manual, one-time interactions to a model where every engagement is informed by real-time context, connected to previous actions, and optimised for what should happen next, according to Cary. In traditional models, she said, teams work in functional silos, marketing, sales and service — and even when goals are shared, the tools and data behind them are often disconnected, producing inconsistent experiences: an offer that overlooks a recent service issue, or a journey that breaks down when a customer switches channels.

Where AI is reshaping marketing, sales and service

Cary pointed to three areas where the impact is most significant.

In marketing, she said AI allows providers to move beyond static segmentation and scheduled campaigns toward continuous, adaptive engagement, with messaging determined by changing customer behaviour rather than predefined rules. “Personalisation shifts from broad audiences to the individual,” she said, adding that relevance is now “a prerequisite for attention.”

In sales, Cary said AI can improve the speed and quality of decision-making — identifying next-best offers, recommending bundles tailored to the individual customer, pricing flexibility that drives adoption while protecting margins, using closed-loop automation to fulfill orders efficiently and accurately. “That combination of higher conversion and lower friction is valuable,” she said, in an environment where margin pressure is real.

In service, she suggested the opportunity may be the most consequential of the three, enabling providers to move from reactive support toward predictive and proactive engagement. “Human agents still play a central role,” Cary said, “but they can be augmented with real-time recommendations, contextual history and autonomous processes that improve both speed and consistency.”

Why AI initiatives are stalling before they scale

Despite the ambition, Cary said the industry’s challenge is not a shortage of models, pilots or intent.

“What it lacks, in many cases, is the ability to turn fragmented customer data into real-time decisions that can actually be executed across marketing, sales and service,” she said.

The same Analysys Mason survey found only 6% of operators reported ROI above 25% from current AI initiatives, Cary noted, while 60% said they move just 20% of AI proofs of concept into production, an 80% failure rate at the PoC stage.

Cary attributed much of this to fragmented customer data, scattered across systems, teams and channels, and often incomplete or difficult to activate in the moment, as well as legacy architecture that makes it difficult to embed intelligence into workflows or orchestrate experiences end to end. She pointed to a further data point from the survey: 93% of operators said the complexity of managing multiple vendors and technologies increases the total cost of ownership for automation initiatives.

“That creates an unfortunate pattern across the industry,” she said, “promising AI initiatives that demonstrate value in isolation but fail to scale because they are not connected to the data, systems and processes where real work happens.”

Making AI operational at the core of engagement

For providers that get this right, Cary said the business outcomes are meaningful: improved revenue growth as interactions become more relevant and timely, higher conversion rates, more intelligent upsell and cross-sell, and stronger retention and loyalty as journeys feel connected rather than fragmented. Efficiency gains follow, too, she said, as automation reduces manual effort across campaigns, sales workflows and service resolution.

“This is why the future of customer experience in communications is not about layering AI onto the edge of the enterprise,” Cary said. “It is about making AI operational at the core of engagement.”

Oracle’s position, she said, rests on combining data, AI and applications with communications industry expertise to support end-to-end transformation rather than isolated improvements, unifying customer data, embedding AI directly into engagement workflows, and connecting customer engagement with the wider telecom environment.

A practical starting point

Cary was clear that providers do not need to transform everything at once. She recommends starting by unifying customer data across touchpoints to establish a trusted, real-time view, before activating high-value AI use cases across marketing, sales and service. From there, providers can embed AI into workflows so insight translates into action rather than sitting in dashboards, eventually connecting those capabilities into end-to-end orchestration.

“The communications providers that lead in the years ahead will not be the ones that simply adopt more AI tools,” Cary said. “They will be the ones that use AI to rethink how customer engagement works across the enterprise.”

“AI is not just enhancing customer experience,” she added. “It is redefining how customer experience is delivered, and in communications, that shift is likely to separate the providers that keep pace from the ones that set the pace.”

Circles and Oracle on accelerating digital transformation with cloud-native charging and billing