AI to transform telecoms but technology won’t completely replace humans, new Optus CEO says – Stephen Rue says artificial intelligence will improve customer service and efficiency, but people required for decisions
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/26/artificial-intelligence-humans-optus-ceo-stephen-rue
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From the article
As companies across the globe begin to examine how to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their business, Rue said the technology would have a significant role in the future of telecommunications, particularly in helping customers.
“One of the things we need to do in terms of IT and data and, indeed, process redesign is to look at how we incorporate AI into that,” he said.
“It will help us with customer experience. It will help us with identifying faults, for example, by identifying customers’ issues so that they [can be] dealt with, enabling them to simply solve their own problems, enabling us to look at customer segmentation in a more granular way, so that we can actually deliver offers, deliver products to customers.”
He said while AI would find efficiencies in the company, humans would always have a role.
“…but people will be required for decision” – like, “How do we fix everything that AI fks up?”
As an insider, I am going to be completely honest. This is BS. Blatant lies when they say it won’t affect FTE resource. That’s the main agenda behind leveraging AI in CSR teams. It slowly will take the jobs away if not immediately.
So F the ‘leaders’
finally one of the most reasonable analysis for ai in its current state. there’s a lot of processes that ai can be used to determine certain things but the output of those things still require a human to look into and come to an ultimate decision.
Long before AI it was simple network switching.
There used to be women who made the connections. You call a number, you talked to a woman working for the telecom, tell her which number you are trying to reach, she makes the connection.
That was all replaced by digitized networks and network switches.
Given the number of phones we have today, and the number of calls we make every day, if it was still people doing the connections. Then every single American would have to be one of them.
Is this proof automation creates more jobs than it automates? Well, without network switching we’d need 300+ million workers… so clearly no.
It’s just the economy and innovation continue and other jobs are created. And luckily it was enough to keep the employment level low.
With AI so many different jobs in so many different industries will be automated, that I doubt enough new jobs will created to plug the gap.
Except that’s already not true for customer service. People don’t want to feel foisted off on robots. Like my local taco bell only has a kiosk inside. Everyone uses the drive thru because that’s where the person that oils the kiosk and makes the food is.
Linkedin’s AI suggested I add something to my profile that was in my CV. I had already added it and told the AI so. It apologised to me. I told it to report itself to its master and it replied that it could not do that.
That’s hardly efficient and did not improve anything.
In my mind, all those invested into AI are imagining a world of the Star Trek computer or HAL 9000, however AI is still very much in its infancy. How many of us would welcome a company customer service department which is staffed by children who have to run to their teachers to get decisions?
I fear that AI is going to cause so many problems for the general public before it “graduates” (whenever that may be). Who’s going to be responsible for the mess and who is going to pay for it?
… Yeah but it if it weren’t for PR, you probably would if you could