Welcome everybody, Tim Horan, the Cloud and Communications analyst. My pleasure to host Anthony again for probably about the eighth time over the last, bunch of years, from Amdocs. Anthony, what's your current title?
I head Technology, Product, and Head Strategy for the company, among a few other things.
And-
Thank you for having me for the eighth time. Glad to be here.
Yeah. So basically, you're running the company. I don't know what all those other management teams do there. And
Apparently, I have good hair, so, you know, they keep me around.
I think you're back in Texas because it's a nice clear day down there.
Yes, yes, it's a beautiful, beautiful 108 degrees outside.
Well, I think last time we did this, there was actually a tornado coming right behind you-
Yes, that's right.
behind you while we were speaking.
You never know. You never know.
Yeah, well, summer's in Texas.
Yeah.
Well, thanks a million. I guess a lot going on. You guys are migrating to the cloud. You're doing a lot on AI. You just sounds like won your first major AI contract.
Yeah.
Revenue growth is improving here. It sounds like the bookings. You know, at a really, really high level, though, I get this question all the time.
Yeah.
Like, a few years ago, you guys were growing almost double digit, and then you kind of went back to flat, you know, little revenue growth. I mean, can you just describe why were you growing so rapidly then? You know, what was the thing that changed? Was there, like, you know, certain customers that were doing major projects, and they stopped, and they might, you know, do it again? Or were there... You know, just any color around, you know, why the volatility?
Yeah. Yeah, sure. Look, I mean, the telecommunications market goes through these kinda cyclical periods for different reasons, for multiple reasons, right? There is the macro environment, obviously, that has an impact on cash, on them paying their dividends and things like that, but there's also cyclical periods on where they're spending and what they're spending on and where they're focusing on, right? So when, for example, you are going into a new set of technology or you're adopting a new set of technology or you're focusing on a new area of growth, there is a lot of activity kind of that happens. And so these cycles, I would say the key thing for us is being ready for the next wave.
So, you know, over the last number of years, I think if you look at our consistency in terms of revenue and booking and things like that, I think we always try to be ready for the next wave in terms of where our customers are going, what they're focusing on. So it doesn't matter if it's ubiquitous connectivity or generative AI or migration to the cloud, you know, right now we feel like we have those good fundamental elements. So when our customers go, "Okay, here's something we really want to do because this is where we want to double down," Amdocs just becomes an obvious choice for them to select.
I think that's a great point. And, you know, what we've seen from the wireless industry in the U.S., I don't know outside the U.S. as much, but, you know, they had huge amounts of investments for 5G.
Yep.
And frankly, the balance sheets largely got destroyed.
Yep.
You know, now they're kind of working on improving the balance sheets. I think next year, the balance sheets look a lot better.
Right.
You know, the other component, I think, that happened is 5G. They got incremental revenue from fixed wireless, but they didn't really get it from a lot of new products and services they were talking about in terms of enterprise revenue-
Yeah.
or maybe even, like, charging for quality of service.
Yeah.
But it looks like we're gonna get standalone getting increasingly rolled out, and then hopefully that and the whole back end kinda gets upgraded.
Yep.
That allows them to now create new products and services. But, you know, not to put words in your mouth.
Oh, no.
Do you think standalone it will be a big deal for them to... and getting the balance sheets in better order, a big deal for them to kind of resume growth?
Yeah, look, you're absolutely spot on, right? You know, you are probably one of the people that really understand the depths of this. You know, it's chicken and the egg, in a way. So you have this capital investment you need to do to roll out 5G. And let's face it, like, you don't have a choice, okay? You can't be a telco and say, "Well, I have the best 4G service." You have to roll out 5G for multiple reasons, right? But you start from the radios, and then you go to the core network, which then enables you to do standalone. But what we kinda have is this hybrid situation, right? You have the cost of capital, you have rolling out while you're not really seeing a huge additive upside in terms of 5G services.
And on the other hand, you know, what are you trying to sell, right? Are you trying to sell a standalone service, a dedicated network slice for an enterprise, things like that. But then, in order to do that, obviously, you need a standalone network. So I think, I think if you kind of look at the spectrum of kind of 5G to obviously, you know, moving on to 6G, it's gonna be this continuum, and you're going to have 5G standalone start to roll out. That, in addition with, you know, there is a very high focus right now, as you've seen everywhere, on fiber, right? Whether it be the JVs, I mean, you see obviously T-Mobile, AT&T, everyone really just focusing on kind of this rollout of fiber. I think this notion of...
I really like this notion of ubiquitous connectivity, right? Like, at the end of the day, when you think of broadband, you can think of broadband broken up into multiple connectivity elements. So obviously, you've got fiber, which is the big chunk of it, which also enables where you kind of put different types of connectivity, like 5G. Then you have things like fixed wireless, right? And then you have, you know, the government coming out and saying, "Well, we're gonna change, you know, the definition of broadband and moving up to 100 Mbps," right? Like, so you have this kind of pressure on consumption, this pressure on saying, "Look, I don't care where I am, just connect me." And being able to deliver these, I think, will start to cause, like, a different type of behavior in the market.
That, coupled with the fact that obviously people are cleaning out their balance sheets, doing the right things, looking at, you know, key JVs in terms of, you know, to lower some of their capital costs of rolling out infrastructure. So there's all, all the right things are happening. And of course, from our perspective, we're focused on migration to the cloud. We're focused on, obviously, core transformations, because there's still so many legacy systems around. Obviously, you saw the announcement of, you know, last year, we—I would say a little bit ahead of the curve, we did the acquisition of Astadia, which really positioned us to help our customers migrate so much of their legacy mainframe infrastructure to the cloud.
Generative AI, you know, we feel like we came in kind of very early on, and, you know, if you ask me, I feel like I've been kind of neck-deep in it for five years, right? But it hasn't really been that long. And we have, you know, like nine, 10 production pilots going on around the place. We have the first award that we had, which is very exciting, obviously. And the results we're seeing out of it are, like, amazing. I mean, I don't remember from a technology perspective, I always know when we talk about business cases, you know, you'd always come to the table and you go: Oh, so if you do this, in, in 18 months, you can deliver phase one of what the business signed up for. We can deliver results in three months, right? To production.
I mean, one of the last pilots we did in North America-
And to be clear, that is the mainframe migration to the cloud?
No, no, sorry. The Generative AI. I kind of flipped-
Okay, sorry.
For a second. Yeah.
The Generative AI.
Yeah, the Generative AI part of it. Like, we can deliver business results, right? Not just, and by the way, it's not just about reducing the standard KPIs like average handling time, but it's also improving things like NPS and customer satisfaction. So I think, I think as we kind of, as you rightly summarized at the beginning, as we kind of... Our customers start to look at what's the next pillar that they want to focus on, as we start to look at connectivity or ubiquitous connectivity being a key pillar, as they start to see, okay, you know what? We've got all this legacy stuff. In order to do, grab some of this new stuff, we need to migrate off it.
We feel like we start to have the right pillars again to, you know, start being, you know, we always were relevant, but just start being at the heart of these discussions.
Yeah, you bring up a whole bunch of great points, as always, and maybe just stepping back on the fiber side. I guess, you know, the big terms of AT&T this quarter, but many others, is convergence, right? But, you know, actually, the industry doesn't really have a converged go-to-market yet. I mean, AT&T doesn't have, you know, one broadband product or brand name, right? And they don't seem to have really converged billing yet or converged customer care. And, you know, not to put words in your mouth, but that would seem to be like a requirement if we're going to go to convergence over time. You know, is that very hard for the industry to do? Would that be a meaningful, you know, project for you guys to do longer term?
Yeah, it's very meaningful from the perspective of, you know, in order to get to any type of true convergence. You know, there's multiple levels if you draw a line, there's multiple levels of convergence, right? Starting from the basic thing that, you know, a lot of companies kind of maybe start with, which we call the staple build, which is essentially just taking two products, adding them together and saying, "Hey, here's convergence," to real, true kind of multi-convergence, where you can provide discounts and bundles and offers and strategic plays. I think what, when it comes to customers, so that's from the telco lens, but when it comes from the consumer lens. When you're looking at it from a consumer lens, right? You have some very basic needs, right? Like, connect me wherever I am, give me the fastest speed.
Doesn't matter if I'm at home or if I'm traveling or wherever I am, and just give it to me, right? So when I talk – when I look at the future and when I look at the notion of ubiquitous connectivity, it shouldn't matter to you if I'm on this mobile device or if I'm on a laptop or if I'm streaming Apple TV in my home. Just give me the best connectivity in the best form you can at the time. Right? I always go back to, like, this basic notion. I think I've, you know, I think you've had me on eight times, maybe I've shared this six times with you. You know, our kids do not think of LTE, 5G, Wi-Fi. Like, they're like: Am I connected or am I not connected? Right. That is the notion.
I think that is the North Star as an industry we need to focus on and aim at, because really, from a consumer perspective, that is key. Take it, take it up a level, there is still a lot of work to be done at an enterprise level, right? Almost every one of our customers, I would say, if the consumer side is almost fully automated and fully digital in many of our major customers, the enterprise side is lagging way on the left side, right? And there are demands coming from the enterprise customers, because the, because they have this kind of, I call it the, you know, kind of the Sunday/Monday experience, right? They're at home, they're ordering Uber, they're, they're DoorDashing, everything's coming in an instant. Then they go to work on Monday, and they're like: What?
I need to wait 72 hours for this? Like, what's going on, right? Like, why is that, why is that enterprise experience so different to a consumer digital experience? It's the same human being.... So I think there is a lot of work to be done at that enterprise layer to simplify the experience, to meet the demands. So the demands are not just connectivity anymore, right? So you take things like cybersecurity, which is at the heart of any connectivity bundled deal or managed services deal that our customers are selling today, right? So whether it's a DMZ or a firewall or, you know, we saw the DDoS attack that happened on X the other day, right? I mean, all of these things are absolutely paramount and key services our customers can sell.
When you talk of convergence and bundling, it's not just consumer, but we also need to think of how you do it in a better, faster, more digitized way on the enterprise space.
So, yeah, I have a daughter working in the CLM industry, and she's like: "Dad, do you know what that is?" I'm like, "No," a year ago, and contract lifecycle management, you know, just trying to automate B2B and use AI, all this stuff, and you know, it's a lot of heavy lifting. I get to hear her.
Yeah.
I get to hear her conference calls around the clock.
Yeah.
But, you know, enterprises definitely wanna do it because they see the massive benefits that you can kind of get there. Have you ever kind of disclosed, like, what percentage of your business now do you think is a little bit more in the business market side of things? And, you know, I think it's probably, you know, more like 25-30% of overall communications spending. You know, have you ever disclosed how meaningful it is now and where it can kind of get to?
Yeah, I don't, I don't think we've exactly split it out.
Sure.
By the way, to tell you the truth, I think it would be, you know, I don't wanna speak for Tamar, but I think it would be very difficult in order to do it as well, because-
Fair point.
some of our systems are all supporting both stacks, right? Like
Sure.
So you may have a single stack supporting both, both kind of B2B. But, but there is still a lot of work in terms of the customer journey. So if you know, your example about, you know, kinda lifetime management of a customer, the standard enterprise contract in the U.S., the last time I checked, it was something like 44 days or something like that, which is crazy, right? That shouldn't be the case. When you can walk into a store, when you can walk into a, you know, AT&T, T-Mobile store, and you can buy, you know, 6 lines, walk out of the store in, you know, under half an hour, right? Like, it's instant. So I... It's an amazing consumer experience, and I think as an industry, we need to do better on the enterprise side, and I think the demand is there, right?
By the way, if we as an industry don't meet it, there's gonna be some other industries that are gonna come in and cannibalize some of these enterprise revenue, which, you know, if you look globally, if you look at the enterprise footprint of our customers, maybe it's been cannibalized, I would say, over the last few years. It's not being cannibalized because there isn't demand. It's being cannibalized because you have, clearly, web-scale guys, startups, people coming in and saying: "Oh, I can give you SD-WAN. You don't need to buy it from ABC," right? So I think, I think our customers are at the best place suited to kinda reimagine or re-envision what that enterprise space looks like. We hope, you know, one of our key pillars is obviously B2B.
We hope that in the next couple of years, this will also be another accelerator for us.
Yeah, no, and I would think it has to be, or to your point, a lot of that is gonna go to the hyperscalers. I guess... And do you guys work with the hyperscalers now much? Do you get-
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I actually just had a meeting with the AWS guys yesterday. I mean, we work with, obviously, and we have our Microsoft partnership, just signed a deal with Google, with Globe in the Philippines. So they are very key to us, and there isn't any. I mean, there's no real, necessarily any competition or anything like that. I mean, we are working hand in hand because we wanna migrate our customers to the cloud. That puts our products on the cloud, our next generation products. We want our customers to start using them. It's good for the cloud vendors, it's good for our customers, it's good for us, so it's kind of a win-win, so there's no dichotomy there.
I think, you know, the other, obviously, the other key player is NVIDIA, which we're working very closely with, in many aspects, and they are a major, major player, obviously, in this ecosystem right now.
So when, just stepping back, if you look at maybe one of your larger customers that's cutting edge, that's really moving everything to the cloud and trying to automate everything, you know, can you talk about where they are in that life cycle? How much more do they got to go to improve, and-
Yeah.
You know, and how much better are their operations becoming as they really are trying to do the cutting-edge stuff?
Yeah, I would say it. I would maybe split that question up in kind of two components. I would say the first part of it is, you know, there are IT workloads that need to move to the cloud, and they haven't all moved to the cloud yet. There are data storage, right? So think of all your data lakes and things like that, that can move to the cloud, and they haven't moved yet. Then there is network workloads that obviously they are very cautious on how they move it, 'cause latency matters, security matters, and that's kind of their core competency, right? So that would kind of be the last pillar, and we haven't really fulfilled on any of those yet, right? So they, all of them are still in various levels of progress, depending on which customer.
I don't think necessarily, you know, any Tier 0, Tier 1 will say, "Look, everything is running on the cloud today or tomorrow," or anything like that. And by the way, I'm not sure that everything will 100%, because we also provide services on running various cloud environments on-prem for different reasons.
Sure.
Right? So when we talk about cloud, it's not just the public cloud. It could be a private cloud. Obviously, we have relationships with the Red Hat guys, like OpenShift and VMware, so we provide solutions. It doesn't matter, you know, if it's sovereign data centers and things like that, we can also provide kind of cloud solutions on-prem.
... And, as they move more and more to the cloud, does your percentage of revenues of their spend increase as a percentage? Like, do they have to use you more on, and also maybe on a recurring basis, is it more and more outsourcing to you through this process?
Yeah, well, we always try to find a compelling event to have a discussion with our customer about managed services. We feel that we can add the best value when we do it, because at the end of the day, we take accountability, right? So you have your products, you have your services, you have your operations, and then you take responsibility end-to-end on delivering kind of the results and the KPIs that they believe in. And, you know, you've known Amdocs for a while. You know, I think we're one of these companies that take pride in taking the responsibility and accountability. We take it, obviously, all our employees take it very personally, and then we're very proud of what we deliver to our customers. So when this decision comes about moving to the cloud, it gives us this opportunity to have a discussion with them.
Okay, so you're using our platform. Now you need to run cloud operations. You need to do FinOps because it's a completely different model, right? I always give this example: If you were a developer on-prem and you needed, you know, X petabytes of storage, you know, you have to fill in a form, you have to wait, someone needs to ship the storage into your data center. It may take three months to set it up, get the power, get the AC. Today, you just go on a console, click a button, and you're spinning it up, right?
With that amazing flexibility also comes this kind of financial impact that suddenly you could go three months, and you go, "Hang on a second, all these developers are using all of these crazy storage areas." So all of FinOps management and operational management become very critical to this space. And because we've invested so much in things like our cloud management operational platform, we feel like it's a great time to have a discussion with our customers about managed services. And so there's transformation. We will build it for you. Here's why we can operate it for you and run it for you. And as part of it, you know, we have this added advantage now with our cloud-native platform. We're doing releases, product releases, seasonal ones, right?
So every quarter, we're bringing them out, so they can take advantage of all the R&D investment we're doing, versus previously, they would have to essentially wait for, you know, 18 or 24 months until a version came out.
Very, very good. A lot of questions kind of popped into, into my head there, and I almost don't like, almost don't know where to start. But, I, I guess just on the... Maybe, have you been winning any new kind of key customers? And I guess maybe just stepping back, what percentage of telcos do you think you serve globally, at this stage? And if they're not using you, what the hell are they doing? And I'm assuming you can dramatically improve their operations and lower their costs over time, you know, by using you, so I guess, why the hell aren't they using you? So I, I guess a combination of two.
Yeah, yeah.
Have you been getting any new... What percentage of customers do you think you serve globally, or telcos you serve, do you think?
Yeah, look, I mean, I think if you look at, you know, the top 40 customers, which are probably responsible for the majority of telco revenue in the industry, right? I think we serve pretty much almost all of them. What we are doing, I would say, is, you know, we obviously haven't announced the customer name for the generative AI deal, but you will see once we announce it, you know. It’s a key customer, it’s a key region, it’s very strategic, and it’s about expanding what we have, right? So, you know, we announced, you know, obviously the catalog win at Verizon. You know, we hadn't had anything there for a while, so that was obviously strategic and key for us.
You know, we need to deliver on the results, deliver it to production, show the value, and hopefully by that, we will be able to expand our footprint. Now, our job in the back end here is to make sure we have valid offerings when they come to the table and say, "Oh, what about this? Or what about that?" We go, "Hey, like, we have a solution for you," right? So if you look at, you know, one of the announcements we had recently was a platform called ConnectX. So, you know, Amdocs has always been focused on kind of, I would say, Tier 0, Tier 1, Tier 2. ConnectX is a fully SaaS platform. You can onboard, pretty much onboard yourself, get yourself up and running very fast. It can be used for MVNOs, for digital brands.
If you're an influencer, for example, wanting to launch a brand, which we have many conversations happening around the place, they could just come on that, and they can customize it, they can make it look any way they want and launch the brand very, very fast. You know, we have, I would... I'm trying to remember the number, but, you know, we only launched it last year. We already have almost 10 or 11 new logos already signed up on it. Most of them are new. So I would say on the top half of telco customers, we are pretty much everywhere. But we also see an opportunity, I would say, on some of the lower tiers, but even on the high tiers, you know, our big customers wanna have an MVNO solution for the long tail, right?
So if you know, Oppenheimer wants to launch their MVNO brand, you know, they can come to AT&T and say, "Hey, like, we'd like to launch our own MVNO brand for our employees," right? Like, and be able to do it fast and quick and cheap. Because when you think of people like influencers who wanna launch a brand, you don't want to make it very cost-prohibitive. Because it may work, it may not work, so you wanna try it. Doesn't work, you move on. It works, catches on, go viral, fantastic. So this we see as a new revenue opportunity. This is a place we see as a new place to target additional customers. By the way, there's also an opportunity to target non-telco customers in that space.
We had a discussion, for example, with a digital financial services organization that wanted to target millennials and have an MVNO brand as part of their credit card offering, right? So we see very interesting kind of dynamics in the industry, and the key thing for us is make sure we're relevant there. Another, you know, quick example is kind of our MarketONE platform, which basically brings, you know, hundreds of digital services, one integration point, and the telco can basically launch all of these digital services to their customers, right? Because now you have this subscription fatigue, right? Even myself, by the way, I, my digital bill is way too big, but I have them on, you know, six different credit cards, on PayPal, on Apple Pay. I mean, I'm like, oh, my gosh!
Like, you know, I, I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but one time I signed up for the same service twice, right, without realizing it, right?
I think we all have.
Yeah.
Because I have a wife and children, and if I don't-
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly. You know, so exactly what happened to us, and it took us almost a year to realize that we had two accounts on the same service, and we were paying for it. And so being able to have everything in one place, I think, you know, we have a solution for this, right? Our Market ONE platform. And several of our customers, you know, if you go back, every quarter, we announce, you know, a customer who's taking it, and this is growing.
So, I think in addition to all of those Tier 0, Tier 1, Tier 2 offerings that we have to our customers, we're also looking at, you know, what are the things that can help our customers think of new revenue ideas or new launchpads in order to kind of, you know, grow their revenue outside kind of the traditional mode, and also go down to maybe some of the lower tiers and have solutions for them.
So, Anthony, one criticism, I guess, of-
Yeah.
I mean, I think you guys, your cloud offering and your GenAI offering, you should be able to substantially improve the customer, your, the telco's operations. You should be able to lower their costs, and you should be able to drive incremental revenue for them versus what they can do internally. I guess, you know, I don't know if I hear that enough from you guys. Like, you know, I kind of like—because that's what the telcos care about, right?
Yeah.
They're starved for revenue growth.
Yeah.
They're starved for free cash flow. You guys are one of the avenues that we can improve your free cash flow growth, guys. And-
I have-
Done it over here, we can do it here.
You know, I don't wanna sound like a little frustrating here, but I don't remember in my 25 years of working in the company, a solution we've had on the board where we can have it in production in less than three months, and I can impact your three major KPIs: average handling time, first call resolution, and increase your transactional NPS, right? And I'm not talking by 5%. I'm talking material impact, right?
Right.
Don't trust us, don't look at... Like, forget about slides. Like, we will have the system in production for you, and by the way, it can run on an, on top of an Amdocs BSS system or a non-Amdocs BSS system. We don't necessarily care. And it's kind of generative AI native, right? So this competes, this can if there are new players that come into the market, you know, it can compete head-to-head with them, right? Because in a way, like, we're almost disrupting ourselves in some of these elements.
Yeah.
Right? And something that can deliver business results like that so fast, I haven't seen in my career in the telecommunications industry, right? So I... You know, our message to our customers, and, you know, right now, I can't remember one week I haven't traveled, because I'm talking to all of our customers about this, and they're trying to figure out how they incorporate it, because it's also an organizational change management aspect of it, right? It's how do I introduce this technology? It's... And by the way, we also try to have a little bit of a layer. Now, we can expose this directly to consumers, but most of our customers are like, "Okay, let's expose this to our agents, and our agents will feed the information to our customer just so we have, like, a safety check," which I understand.
But even with that, the fact that all of a sudden we can take an agent and make them a super agent, right? Like, that's our claim to fame. And, and this is why, you know, we're kind of excited about it. We have, you know, a whole bunch of pilots, and hopefully, you know, we have more of our customers taking this stuff on. The other, the other—so that's all about efficiency.
And so, Anthony, we're sitting, I mean, so it sounds like you could save the industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Is that fair?
Yeah. Look, I think if you look at all of the call centers that our customers run... Someone told me, I think it might have been in one of your conferences, one of our investors told me that telcos make up something like 20% of all kind of call center volume. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's probably not small, right? We can assume it's not small. And the fact that we can get double-digit saving, I mean, we're talking, you know, just to give you a simple practical benchmark, we're talking about someone calling in about something, in this case, it was a bill query, which on average takes 12-14 minutes to handle. It's handled in 2 minutes, and not only higher first call resolution, it's higher NPS as well, right?
Like, tell me the last time a customer called and complained to you that they were unhappy, and they walk away with a higher NPS score, right? Like, that doesn't happen.
I'm sure the industry is spending tens of billions of dollars on CX, right? And if you can improve that by 20%, 30%, you're talking, you know, billions and billions of dollars.
Yeah, and, and part of the—I think part of the, part of the problem here is there is a lot of noise, right? There are, like, everyone, I mean, you can imagine, everybody is waving their hands in the air. I don't think there's any investor call or earnings call or anything like that, that people aren't saying, "Hey, I'm doing GenAI, I'm doing GenAI," right? I... And, and this is—and our customers are doing the right thing. They're like: Hey, like, can we run a pilot?... Right, and, and they're running, by the way, they're running pilots in production. It's not even a test pilot, right? And, and looking-
And do you have a sense, I mean, I follow other contact center companies.
Yep.
You know, they say for digital interactivity, for every dollar an enterprise is spending with them, like someone like a NICE or-
Yep.
There's plenty of them out there. They save the customers $5. Like, literally, they can measure this stuff, like, perfectly. I mean, do you guys have a sense of,
Yeah, look, just do the, just do the calculation, right? So do the calculation of, you know, an average handling time of 14 minutes, still having an agent in the middle, so we're not getting rid of it, which we can, but we... Let's say, for safety right now, we're being cautious, and we're not. That 14 minutes reduces to two minutes, right? So you can just do the math there overall, what you could save. And then you add on top of that the fact that you also increase NPS. You have both quantitative and qualitative, and you have first call resolution, where half of them never, you know, increases by 50%, and half of them never call back at all. And so I think, I mean, the data is there.
Yeah.
And if you don't believe the data on other pilots, do it yourself. Now, I think the added advantage of Amdocs, different to, you know, the traditional people that are just doing CX, we can also orchestrate the journey entirely through the system, right? So if you-
End to end, yeah.
Yeah, end to end, right? So, so for example, if someone's calling in, we can actually give them a prompt or a button to say, "Hey, I would like this," and then change their plan, adjust their proration, figure out their early termination, all at the same time and execute it in one transaction. So we're not just someone needs to copy, text, type it in another box, move it to another one, "Oh, this is what it said." 'Cause that, that becomes swivel chair again and, and gets very tiring very quickly, right? Like, you can fulfill the entire transaction in one place, and you can do it in natural language, right?
Do you-
Like, that's the, that's the difference, I think, with us.
Do you have that capability now? I mean, this product-
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, in production.
How much of an improvement is this versus what they were doing before, that end-to-end capability? Like, so the contact center, basically, agent can basically almost look like a service lineman, I mean, of the old days, right? Where they don't have to go out to your house and you know, connect the wire and turn up the CPE equipment.
Yeah. Look, one of the, one of the anecdotes kind of I heard was, you can imagine the tenure of call center employees, you know, there's a high turnover.
Yeah.
You invest a lot in training, right? You need to teach them a system. Every release you put out, you need to say, "Well, there's this screen, and then there's this screen, and there's this dropdown, and this is how you do it." And now they're just sitting there, right, like, just natural text, natural English, translating. And by the way, we're doing a pilot also in a Spanish-speaking country, and we have no issue with the language either, by the way.
Wow!
So that translation is also amazing that we can take it to customers, not just, you know, English-speaking customers. And the fact that you can reduce training, you can take a new agent and make them like a super agent that has had five years' experience. Think about it, right? If you're an agent, think about all the offers, the promotions, all the policies and procedures that someone needs to have in their brain. There is no way, right, like, a person that's been trained in two weeks is gonna know this stuff. So they're gonna revert to the three things that they know, the two offers that they heard about, and they're gonna just do the same thing. And the fact that suddenly you unlock all of these should be a revenue potential.
And one of our selling in Smart Agent allows you to have conversational selling, right? Which means you're calling in for a complaint, it analyzes it, it looks at the plan you have, looks at what you've done in the past, and it says: "Based on all of this, here are some of the other things that you can do. If you want it, we can activate it by one click of the button," right? So this is, I think, where Amdocs brings value to the table. And of course, I don't blame our customers as well. I think we are in that, you know, I think Gartner said we're kind of, like, entering into the trough of disillusionment, right?
Because everyone's like, "Gen AI, Gen AI," and people are like, "Okay, fine, like, show me the results." And the good thing is, we can show you the results, and if you don't believe the results we're showing you, we can get it into production in three months, and then you can experience the results firsthand. So I think that's the, that's the exciting thing for the industry.
So, Anthony, in three months, I'm gonna have another chat with you, going into a lot-
I'm sure.
-more details about AI. I know we could have used up this entire time period about, you know, what you've done, but can you just give us some, an elevator pitch of, you know, how you've enabled this AI? Is it that you have, you know, great data, you know, great operating support system? Just, you know, any color around what you're doing in AI.
Yeah. So I think, first of all, it starts with the industry experience, right? So we have solution books that understands entire customer journeys of enterprise, of B2B customers, of what happens with all of the data. Then it's the fact that we understand all the plumbing, right? All the interfaces, where the data comes from, what is more accurate, what is the customer record. That allows us, right now we're getting higher than 96% accuracy. I don't think, by the way, if you compare that accuracy with a human giving answers, I don't think you can achieve 96% accuracy with a human, 'cause they make mistakes, right? And you can orchestrate the end result, right? So end to end, like, there's no downside. Like, like, if someone... You know, I would love a customer to give me a downside, right?
I haven't heard, I haven't heard why you wouldn't do it, other than, you know, the traditional stuff, right? Which I know we have to deal with, such as org management, such as rethinking, such as, you know, It's like a, it's like you need to take your workforce and turn it upside down in a way, right? If you, if, even if you look at the way Amdocs kind of started, you know, almost two years ago, kind of building this, we created a completely separate team, right? We, we segmented them. We, we just gave them a blank page, and we said, "Here's what... You know, here's the vision, here's where you wanna go." And in a way, from an organizational perspective on the telco side, that's almost what you need to do.
You need to say, "Okay, let me reimagine what the customer care experience looks like," versus, "Can I tinker around the edges and do this?" Because the-
And Anthony, will this accelerate their migration to cloud or using some of your other products or, you know, more of your catalog? Will this accelerate buying all your products, do you think?
Yeah. So, so our amAIz platform is cloud-native, built on the cloud, right? So, so by default, it accelerates, it migrates, it moves everything, moves everything to the cloud. And as you start to think about it and you start to look at some of the plumbing implications of where the data is coming from, where the data is going to, you know, there is an opportunity to also migrate all your data lakes, your reference lakes, and things like that to the cloud. So obviously, there is a, for us, you know, it's a little bit of a self-serving comment, obviously, but there is a lot of pull-through potential that, that exists as well in this scenario.
Well, it sounds like really, really exciting time, and I think we're gonna. I think it's you and I having another chat in three months. So I appreciate it, and we'll go through a lot more-
The tenth time. We should have a celebration.
Yeah, absolutely. You'll be able to give us a lot more detail, and update on what, kind of what's going on. But thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Matt Smith.
All right. Thank you for having me.
Let me talk to Anthony again.
Take care.
Bye. Thank you very much.