One topic that comes up every year at MWC, the telecommunications industry’s largest and de facto standard event, is modernizing telco networks to enable them to create new, revenue-generating services. However, again at this year’s conference in Barcelona, revenue growth for service providers remains elusive, despite the industry having spent billions on building out its 5G infrastructure and introducing many digital experience products. Despite those investments, annual revenue growth is expected to diminish to less than 3% by 2029, according to a PwC forecast.

Last week, ahead of the MWC mayhem, Salesforce Inc., which grew into an industry giant by providing technology to help companies grow their revenue, launched a new product — Agentforce for Communications — that aims to do the same for telcos. It features five new prebuilt agents to help telco teams reclaim their time and capitalize on opportunities to create new revenue streams that didn’t exist before.

“We’re embedding agentic AI or Agentforce into almost all of our products. This is the big change that we’ve seen in the past year and a half,” Meredith Alexander, who leads industry marketing for the company, said in a briefing for industry analysts. “We’ve fully pivoted the company and are embracing Agentforce across every part of our business. By integrating Agentforce into every element of our platform, employees gain access to the benefits of agentic AI in their workflow. Agentforce also uses our industry data model and metadata layer, so it has the context to understand our customers’ businesses and industry.”

Focus on telecommunications companies

Alexander said Salesforce designed Agentforce for Communications to help telecom customers reduce their operating costs while still accelerating growth. “We believe a key to breaking through the headwinds and achieving unconstrained growth is agentic AI, because it empowers our customers to supercharge their workforce,” Alexander said. “Instead of workers slogging through manual tasks like writing case reports or searching for customer information or responding to repetitive questions, agents can tackle these tasks for them, freeing the human workers to focus on higher-value activities like building customer relationships or resolving complex issues.”

Benefits for Salesforce’s telecommunications customers include accelerating revenue and reducing costs, so they can “optimize marketing with hyper-personalized engagement. They can increase sales by shortening deal cycles and improve order delivery by reducing fallout. And this is all while they’re able to reduce their cost to serve, but also boost their customer satisfaction with consistent and seamless experiences across every point of interaction,” she said.

Natively built on the Agentforce 360 platform, Agentforce for Communications pulls live data from customer relationship management, operations support systems and business support systems, enabling agents to “take trusted action instantly, respond in natural language, and leverage deep customer context to find immediate solutions and opportunities to drive growth.”

The company says Agentforce for Communications will enable “a self-healing network where issues are resolved before they’re even noticed, billing is transparent, service is efficient, and human representatives are free to go above and beyond to deliver world-class service.”

Agentforce replaces manual data retrieval with “real-time, actionable intelligence, enabling them to focus on complex, empathetic problem solving and win-win scenarios that drive revenue while building lasting brand loyalty.”

Five agents, five strategic levers

Salesforce has introduced five prebuilt agents that directly address the most painful areas of the telco lifecycle:

• Billing Resolution Agent: By harmonizing data across fragmented third-party systems, this agent provides deep bill analysis and autonomous resolution. Of all the capabilities AI can bring, this could be one of the most significant. Billing disputes are a primary driver of churn. Removing the “I need to talk to a supervisor” bottleneck can shift a moment of frustration into a moment of trust.
• Service Level Objective Insights Agent: This shifts the mindset from reactive support to proactive assurance. By comparing real-time network usage against service-level agreements, it allows account owners to get ahead of outages or performance dips. In the business-to-business world, this is the difference between a renewed contract and a lost client.
• Quoting Agent and Site Grouping Agent: These two are the “velocity multipliers.” Configuring quotes for multisite enterprise deals is notoriously complex, prone to technical incompatibilities and human error. Automating these with natural language inputs reduces the “fall-out rate” of orders and slashes the time spent in the middle office.
• Guided Selling Agent: This is perhaps the most intriguing from a revenue perspective. It puts the power of a sales engineer in the pocket of a field technician. When techs are onsite for a repair, they are in the ultimate “high-touch” position. Giving them the ability to generate technically valid upsell quotes in the moment turns a cost-center into a revenue-generating opportunity.

Industry leaders are already seeing the ‘AI dividend’

We are already seeing early signs of this working. Lumen Technologies is reclaiming more than 300 hours of productivity every week. One NZ has seen a fourfold increase in engagement.

When you strip away the manual overhead of data retrieval and reconciliation, telcos aren’t just saving money, they are freeing your most expensive resource, your human employees, to do what they do best: Solve complex, high-value problems that require empathy and nuanced decision-making.

The bottom line: Can telcos rebrand as AI-first?

The telco industry has been notoriously slow to modernize its internal tech stack due to the sheer complexity of legacy infrastructure. Salesforce is positioning Agentforce as the “glue” that allows these disparate systems to function as a modern, agentic enterprise.

If telcos can effectively deploy these agents, they move from being “dumb pipes” providers to sophisticated digital service providers. They can resolve issues before they are noticed, offer pricing that makes sense for the customer’s usage, and — most importantly — keep their sales teams focused on the customer rather than the spreadsheet.

The revenue growth challenge isn’t insurmountable, but it requires a change in strategy. It requires moving from a world where AI is a customer-facing mask to a world where AI is an internal, operational engine. With Agentforce for Communications, Salesforce has given the industry the roadmap to get there. The question for telco chief information officers and chief marketing officers is no longer “Should we adopt agentic AI?” It is “How fast can we integrate it into our core operations before the competition makes the move for us?”

AI presents the latest and best opportunity for telcos to add new services that can change how they are perceived. They own the network and that’s a great asset. Now they need to build on top of that. Agentic AI can change almost every aspect of telco operations, which is important for an industry that continues see capital investments grow well ahead of revenue.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Image: Salesforce