T-Mobile sees opportunity in artificial intelligence to analyze why customers leave the company, attempting to retain more of them and improve in an area where it’s already doing better than others in the wireless industry.
Mike Sievert, T-Mobile’s CEO, referenced the plans during an on-stage interview at the Technology Alliance’s annual State of Technology luncheon in Seattle on Thursday afternoon, when he was asked by moderator Jonathan Sposato, GeekWire chairman and Seattle magazine publisher, about what’s next for T-Mobile.
Sievert responded by acknowledging that they couldn’t have a panel in 2023 without referencing AI.
“I hate to feed the hype cycle,” he said. “But I think we will look back in a decade and understand that this moment, this half-decade right now, is as profound as the 80s, when desktop computers arrived; as the 90s when the web arrived; as the 2010s as smartphones took over.”
He added, “AI is going to change everything about how companies are operating.”
Sievert, who got his start marketing toothpaste at Procter & Gamble, served previously as T-Mobile’s CMO and COO, before succeeding John Legere as CEO three years ago.
He said he sees in AI an opportunity to gain a much deeper understanding of customer motivations, moving further from the analog world in which companies treated every customer more or less the same.
Sievert cited the opportunity to use AI to better understand and improve churn, the rate at which customers leave.
T-Mobile is currently the only major U.S. wireless company with a declining churn rate (0.89% in Q1 2023 vs. 0.93% in Q1 2022) among postpaid subscribers, who represent the most credit-worthy and coveted customer base.
“That’s very good,” he said. “But still, because we’re very big company, millions of people left us last year. And that just gnaws at us. Every one of them left a trail of data before they finally threw their hands up and gave up on us. Something was going wrong, something in the network, something in the customer interaction.”
He said AI can be used to help understand the underlying customer experiences by working across disparate data sets.
“So now that’s a big focus of our company, and that’s what you can expect,” he said. “Nothing will change about who we are … but now it’s going to have be rethought for this next era in a very profound way.”
As for the AI hype in the industry, Sievert had more to say.
“It’s going to be simultaneously bigger than most people expect, and take a little longer than the hype cycle suggests,” he said. “The world’s not going to be different as we know it in 18 months … but it’s going to be profoundly different in ways you can’t even imagine in a decade.”
