Airtel builds 6 AI agents, 'Thanks app' to transform customer search

India’s second-largest telecom services provider (TSP) Bharti Airtel is quietly building its own artificial intelligence (AI) agents across functions, such as buying, billing, payments and customer care that are used by its customer base of more than 380 million every day.

 

Over the last 18 months, the company has been experimenting with AI and has also actively begun integrating it within its operations over the past couple of quarters.

 

Six individual AI agents are being built on top of its proprietary data platform, which are being housed under its wholly-owned subsidiary Xtelify.

 

According to people aware of the plans, the company intends to make AI a core function across its operations at the back end. It will also make its ‘Airtel Thanks’ app as the sole point of contact for all customer-related enquiries and solutions.

 

Queries to Bharti Airtel did not elicit a response before going to press.

 

“About six months ago, AI was put at the core of operations. Even before that, about 3,000 engineering and tech workforce was reorganised. A converged data engine was built and on top of that six AI agents — across platforms of data, buy, build, pay, serve and channels — were created,” said a senior industry executive.

 

Another executive privy to the development said the AI agents being developed will work under an orchestrating AI agent, in other words, an umbrella AI agent. This will become the single point of contact for all customer queries, similar to what ChatGPT or Gemini look like now.

 

“The vision is that at some stage in the future, the Airtel Thanks app would look like a Google search bar, where consumers can ask anything related to the issue they’re facing or anything that they want to buy. For example, an international roaming plan. The AI agents talk to each other and simply produce it as a solution,” the executive added.

 

Having insourced its IT operations, including operations support and billing support systems from IBM several years ago, and now with the introduction of AI, the company has reportedly reduced its IT costs to 1.5 per cent of overall revenue. This is against the average 5.5-6 per cent global TSP spend.

 

“Some European telcos spent around 12 per cent, because their systems are siloed,” the first executive said.

 

Airtel’s digital arm Xtelify will pitch its AI-powered platforms to other global companies, including European players.

 

Last month, the company launched Airtel Cloud, also within XTelify.

 

Here, it also introduced the AI-powered software platform aimed at improving customer experience, lowering churn and raising the average revenue per user (ARPU) for other telecom companies.

 

Among the first contract wins for the platform was Singapore’s leading telecom operator Singtel, which is also a shareholder in Bharti Airtel. It also includes the telco’s Africa operations arm Airtel Africa, which has operations in 14 countries in the continent, and Philippines’ Globe Telecom.

 

Sector experts said that telecom operators were increasingly adopting AI and Gen AI in their core operations, which had moved beyond building use cases.

 

“All companies are adopting agentic Gen AI in some form. A perfect example of this is the launch of the anti-spam service which is based on agentic AI. Some have been used in contract management, HR functions, financial invoicing and process technology use cases. For example, for automating network operation centre also. It's widely adopted by all telcos, for consumers call centres. Its smart agents are handling those calls,” said Vinish Bawa, partner and telecom sector leader at PwC India.