Intelligent customer service Vodafone invests 140 million euros in AI systems from Microsoft and OpenAI

Chatbots with AI have been used by mobile operators for years to process customer inquiries efficiently. Vodafone is now investing a lot of money to optimize its chatbot using new AI.

Vodafone is planning to invest around 140 million euros in AI systems from Microsoft and OpenAI this year in order to process customer inquiries more efficiently. The Düsseldorf-based company announced that the chatbot "TOBi" will respond to customer queries faster and more effectively thanks to the use of advanced AI technology.

The chatbot was introduced in Vodafone's customer service five years ago and was equipped with the real voice of a Vodafone employee. Last year alone, the system received eight million customer enquiries in Germany and resolved around 65% of them independently without the need for human assistance.

TOBi" was integrated into Vodafone's customer service five years ago and uses the voice of a real Vodafone employee. Last year, the system processed eight million inquiries in Germany and was able to resolve 65% of them without human intervention.

The use of OpenAI technology in the Microsoft Azure Cloud is intended to further increase this performance. Experience from Portugal and Italy, where Azure OpenAI is already being used, shows positive results.

In Germany, the new system will be introduced in the coming weeks and is intended to support customers in particular in solving hardware problems and setting up fixed network routers.

Staff replaced by AI

In March, Vodafone Germany announced plans to cut and relocate around 2,000 jobs. At that time, the company employed around 15,000 people, a third of them in the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia. Around 13 percent of the workforce is affected by the cost-cutting program. At the same time, it was announced that the company would increasingly rely on AI and merge separate customer service systems for cable connections and mobile communications.

The technology used at Vodafone comes from Microsoft and contains key AI components from OpenAI. As Microsoft is a major investor in the start-up OpenAI, the company can not only use ChatGPT in its products, but also the image generator DALL-E and the speech transcription model Whisper, which converts spoken language into text almost error-free.

dpa