T-Mobile CEO Sievert explains how the carrier will use AI to improve its business

When a wireless carrier reports its quarterly numbers every three months, some of the most important numbers released include the net number of new postpaid phone subscribers and the churn percentage. The latter is the percentage of a wireless provider's customers that leave that carrier and sign up with a new one. T-Mobile was the only one of the major wireless firms in the U.S. to report a declining churn percentage during Q1.

For the first quarter of 2023, T-Mobile's postpaid phone churn was .89% down from a churn of  .93% during Q1 2022. Verizon's Q1 postpaid phone churn figure was .84%, up from .77% during the same quarter the previous year. AT&T's first-quarter postpaid phone churn was .81% compared with the .79% it reported during the same quarter in 2022.

Mike Sievert, T-Mobile CEO, is pleased with the sub 1% churn that T-Mobile has reported for its postpaid phone service. "That’s very good," Sievert said. "But still, because we’re a 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."

According to Geekwire, Sievert said at the Technology Alliance's annual State of Technology luncheon in Seattle on May 25th that he believes that the answer to taking T-Mobile's churn rate even lower is to use AI. Through artificial intelligence, Sievert says that T-Mobile will be able to find out why consumers are leaving the carrier and help the executive and his staff see a problem before it leads to a mass exodus.

The executive said, "So now that’s a big focus of our company, and that’s what you can expect. Nothing will change about who we are … but now it’s going to have to be rethought for this next era in a very profound way."

T-Mobile's CEO says that it will take some time, perhaps as long as a decade, but AI will lead to big changes in the world. Sievert said, "It’s going to be simultaneously bigger than most people expect and take a little longer than the hype cycle suggests. 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."