Kuljesh Puri is the Senior Vice President and Normal Supervisor of Communications, Media & Know-how at Persistent Methods. He brings over 26 years of expertise throughout the software program, telecom, and semiconductor industries, together with intensive worldwide publicity and a ardour for transformation.
Earlier than becoming a member of Persistent, Kuljesh headed the Telecom Product Engineering portfolio at Tech Mahindra. Earlier than that he labored at Harman Worldwide, a Samsung firm, as Vice President and International Normal Supervisor for the Telecom and Industrial verticals, mandated with defining a development trajectory for the enterprise. Earlier, Kuljesh spent 15 years in senior enterprise and engineering roles at Aricent in each the B2B and B2C companies.
Persistent Methods is a world digital engineering and enterprise modernization firm that companions with companies to drive innovation and speed up digital transformation. With deep experience in software program, cloud, and information, Persistent delivers end-to-end options throughout industries, together with healthcare, monetary providers, communications, and know-how.
What are essentially the most transformative methods you see AI impacting name heart operations in telecom and media right this moment?
Historically, contact facilities have been value facilities designed to deal with buyer queries. Over time, from phone-based name facilities, consumer service has advanced into multi-channel service facilities via chat, emails, and cell apps. Key improvements like seamless omnichannel experiences, AI-driven multilingual self-service, sentiment evaluation, and predictive churn administration are not non-compulsory—they’re important. On the identical time, Agentic AI is remodeling contact facilities into consumer expertise facilities by totally dealing with end-to-end duties like billing corrections, plan upgrades, or technical troubleshooting with out human intervention, going past scripted chatbots. General, AI is enabling companies to anticipate consumer wants quite than merely reacting to them by switching from reactive help to predictive, personalised and self-improving. The result’s enhanced operational effectivity and the power to drive deeper consumer satisfaction and loyalty. By decreasing prices and bettering service, AI is remodeling name facilities from conventional value facilities into high-value, client-centric hubs that instantly affect income.
How are predictive analytics, automation, and NLP bettering real-time buyer interactions?
The combination of predictive analytics, automation, and Pure Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionizing how we interact with shoppers in actual time. Predictive analytics permits organizations to anticipate consumer habits and supply proactive options. Automation hastens processes, making certain speedy responses to consumer queries whereas minimizing human error. However, NLP empowers chatbots and digital assistants to interact in additional pure, human-like conversations, bettering each the standard and velocity of service. When mixed, these applied sciences create an setting the place consumer interactions are sooner and extra personalised—in the end enhancing the consumer expertise and fostering loyalty.
How does AI contribute to making a extra seamless, omnichannel buyer expertise?
AI is the important thing element of a seamless, omnichannel consumer expertise. It allows firms to combine interactions throughout varied channels—whether or not it’s a chatbot on a web site, a dialog on social media, or a cellphone name to a contact heart. By consolidating information from these touchpoints, AI ensures the messaging is constant and tailor-made to every consumer. The true energy of AI lies in its capacity to personalize these interactions, making certain that shoppers obtain related, context-aware help throughout channels. This creates a frictionless expertise, the place shoppers can transfer from one touchpoint to a different with out dropping continuity.
With intensive expertise working with telecom and media firms, we now have helped organizations leverage AI to streamline buyer journeys, enhance workflows, and supply a unified expertise. This allows shoppers to create a extra seamless, personalised service that enhances satisfaction and drives lasting loyalty.
What are the commonest ache factors organizations face when deploying AI into their name facilities?
One of many largest challenges organizations face when deploying AI of their name facilities is integrating it with legacy methods. Many conventional contact facilities, significantly these counting on on-premises options, lack the infrastructure to help AI’s superior capabilities. Migrating to the cloud is important to unlocking AI’s full potential, however this transition might be advanced and expensive. Moreover, AI fashions require high-quality, well-organized information, which legacy methods typically battle to supply. Making certain a easy transition with out disrupting the client expertise is one other vital hurdle. Privateness and safety issues concerning information utilization additionally have to be addressed comprehensively.
Organizations want an skilled accomplice to navigate these challenges—one with a deep understanding of each AI and industry-specific wants. We’ve helped many telecom and media firms modernize their contact facilities, overcoming these ache factors and making certain seamless transitions that enhance operational effectivity and improve the general buyer expertise.
For instance, Persistent collaborated with a number one U.S. telecommunications know-how supplier to reinforce their contact heart operations. The consumer needed to research buyer interactions via their conversational AI platform to realize insights into buyer satisfaction and agent efficiency. We developed a GCP-backed information analytics layer that processed information from over 30 real-time streaming pipelines, dealing with over one billion messages day by day. This resolution supplied close to real-time insights, serving to the consumer monitor key metrics like caller sentiment and repair satisfaction, in the end bettering buyer expertise and operational effectivity.
By partnering with specialists who perceive each AI and the telecom {industry}, organizations can overcome frequent deployment challenges, modernize their contact facilities, and unlock precious data-driven insights to reinforce buyer interactions and drive operational enhancements.
What are a number of the largest variations in how telecom vs. media firms are adopting AI for consumer service?
The telecommunications sector has lengthy been a pioneer in establishing large-scale contact facilities, pushed by the necessity to handle important providers comparable to billing inquiries, new connections, and troubleshooting connectivity points. These capabilities stay central to the {industry}, and AI is more and more leveraged to optimize operations in these areas, as they characterize a good portion of consumer help ticket volumes. Given the aggressive panorama, many telecom operators additionally use predictive analytics to anticipate consumer churn, enabling focused advertising and marketing campaigns and retention methods.
In distinction, media firms deal with AI for various functions, comparable to detecting account sharing, managing subscriptions, analyzing viewing patterns, curating content material, and enhancing consumer engagement via automated self-service choices.
At Persistent, we now have labored with each telecom and media firms to tailor AI options that meet their distinct challenges. For telecom, we deal with bettering operational efficiencies and leveraging predictive analytics to drive proactive customer support. For media firms, we purpose to reinforce buyer engagement via AI-driven suggestions, content material personalization, and self-service automation.
In your expertise, what cultural or organizational shifts are vital to completely embrace AI in these sectors?
To completely embrace AI, telecom and media firms should endure a cultural shift towards turning into data-driven organizations. This requires fostering a mindset of steady studying and innovation throughout all departments. AI adoption isn’t just an IT initiative, it requires cross-department collaboration, significantly between IT, consumer service, and operations. Corporations should spend money on AI expertise and deal with reskilling their current workforce to make sure they’ve the abilities to handle and work alongside AI methods. Moreover, adopting agile methodologies can be essential to permitting organizations to shortly iterate and optimize their AI options. Sturdy management is important to drive these adjustments and make sure that AI initiatives align with total enterprise aims, significantly bettering consumer expertise whereas driving enterprise outcomes.
How does the acquisition of Starfish Associates strengthen Persistent’s AI-powered contact heart and unified communications capabilities?
The acquisition of Starfish Associates considerably enhances Persistent’s place within the AI-powered contact heart and unified communications house. This strategic acquisition builds on our current engineering capabilities within the Contact Middle and Unified Communications area, increasing our AI-driven enterprise transformation experience and reinforcing our deal with operational excellence. Starfish Associates is thought for its cutting-edge Enterprise Communications automation platform, which serves a number of the world’s largest enterprises, together with many Fortune 500 firms. When mixed with Persistent’s strengths in AI-driven automation, this acquisition permits us to supply much more highly effective, built-in options that streamline workflows, improve consumer engagement, and enhance operational effectivity.
Information safety and privateness are high issues for organizations in telecom—how is Persistent addressing these in AI-enabled customer support options?
Information safety and privateness are essential issues, particularly within the telecom {industry}, the place consumer information is delicate and extremely regulated. At Persistent, we assist telecom firms navigate these challenges by implementing AI options that guarantee information safety at each step. We help our shoppers in attaining compliance with international rules comparable to GDPR, CCPA, and different information safety legal guidelines, embedding privateness safeguards inside their AI-powered customer support operations.
We help shoppers in integrating sturdy safety features, together with encryption, anonymization, and entry controls, to safe information all through its lifecycle. Moreover, we guarantee transparency by serving to shoppers preserve full management over their information, providing clear visibility into the way it’s used and managed. By offering ongoing AI mannequin audits and danger assessments, we make sure that our options stay safe, compliant, and adaptable as rules evolve, giving our shoppers the boldness to leverage AI applied sciences responsibly whereas sustaining buyer belief.
Lastly, what does success appear to be to you with regards to AI-powered consumer expertise for telecom gamers over the subsequent 5 years?
Over the subsequent 5 years, AI will redefine the position of contact facilities within the telecom {industry}. Success can be measured by the power of telecom firms to remodel conventional name facilities into proactive consumer engagement hubs. Agentic AI will rework telecom buyer expertise by proactively resolving points, providing personalised help, and enabling autonomous service actions throughout channels. Studying from interactions to adapt in actual time ensures sooner, smarter, and extra human-like engagement, which is essential for buyer expertise transformation.
By offloading 50%-60% of routine consumer service duties to Agentic AI, telecom operators can enhance effectivity whereas permitting human brokers to deal with extra advanced points. Predictive analytics will play a pivotal position in anticipating consumer wants, whereas omnichannel integration will guarantee a seamless expertise throughout all touchpoints.
At Persistent, we assist telecom and media firms implement Agentic AI options that drive innovation and enhance buyer interactions. Our experience in AI and telecom allows the creation of smarter, extra agile contact facilities, leveraging information to align with enterprise objectives. Wanting forward, our purpose is to assist these organizations securely infuse AI throughout their operations, deepening their reference to prospects and positioning them for achievement in a quickly evolving digital panorama.
Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to study extra ought to go to Persistent Methods.
