By next year, T-Mobile will almost completely reverse a major 2018 Uncarrier move

Is it just me? Am I wrong because I'd prefer to deal with a human customer service agent rather than an AI bot? T-Mobile thinks that I'm wrong and that it is right. T-Mobile's Chief Operating Officer Jon Freier had an interesting comment during T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom's AI Investor day in Bonn, Germany.

T-Mobile's aim to reduce human-handled customer service calls is a big mistake

If you have had frustrating customer service calls talking to what you later discovered was an AI bot, listen to this. Freier said that T-Mobile's target to reduce human-handled customer care calls by a whopping 75% by the end of 2027 is making real progress.

I don't know about you, but I believe that this is a shameless plan to eliminate human employees to save money. The decaying body of the Uncarrier is rolling over in its grave. Is using AI to handle customer care calls really putting the customer first?

The problem is that these AI bots are so good at sounding human. By adding pauses in the right spots, what I like to call strategic-uhs (first popularized by sportscaster Marv Albert) along with the shuffling of paper in the background, you'll be manipulated into telling your side of the story in a way that makes you look bad and the carrier look good.

This plan reverses a major Uncarrier move announced in 2018

In 2018, T-Mobile announced that it was removing the biggest pain-point for customers, which it said was the old and broken customer care system. T-Mobile introduced its "Team of Experts."

A little more than eight years ago, T-Mobile said that its announcement meant that there would be no more robots and no more automated menus. The carrier's customers won't have to yell "representative, representative" on the phone and get transferred from one department to another.

Now here we are, eight years later, and all of the things that T-Mobile said that it was getting rid of in 2018, it was excited about bringing back in 2027. T-Mobile has already reduced the number of customer calls handled by humans by 55%. AI agents now handle 40% of customer contacts.

Jeff Simon, T-Mobile's Chief Information Officer (CIO), said during the event that T-Mobile customers love the experience of having their questions answered faster and without human interaction. I'm not so sure that this is true.

The carrier's AI-powered self-organizing network (SON) has helped customers regain service during a storm

However, AI is helping T-Mobile and its customers in other ways. T-Mobile President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) John Saw says that the carrier uses AI to help with its AI-powered self-organizing network (SON) capabilities, which is used after natural disasters to adjust sites.

During this year's Winter Storm Fern that took place in January, the carrier made 30,000 adjustments to its antennas using SON, which is something that humans would not be able to do.

During the storm, T-Mobile used SON to reduce power usage at cell sites to extend the battery backup by more than 250,000 minutes during the storm. To show you how well this worked, 68% of T-Mobile customers knocked offline by the storm were reconnected after just one hour.

Even more amazing, 98% of the T-Mobile subscribers who lost their connection to the carrier during the storm found themselves hooked up with T-Mobile within the first eight hours after their service was interrupted.

T-Mobile's Saw stated that most of the carrier's customers, who lost their T-Mobile service thanks to the storm, got back their cell service before their power went back on. Saw also said that physical AI is the next big thing for T-Mobile when it comes to AI.

Physical AI is the next big thing says T-Mobile CTO John Saw

Physical AI is AI that acts within the real world. Using sensors, cameras, and lidar, physical AI allows objects to understand where they are located in 3D space. With this spatial awareness, physical AI figures out how to perform tasks such as moving certain objects, keeping gravity and friction in mind.

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