Editorial - Published - December 8, 2025 - The Fast Mode
To view original article: https://www.thefastmode.com/expert-opinion/46273-from-reactive-to-proactive-unlocking-the-true-potential-of-ai-for-exceptional-network-performance-cx
AI is transforming the telco industry across multiple domains. The Future of the Connected Home 2025 report from Omdia and the Broadband Forum for example, highlights that AI applications are already providing significant operational efficiencies in the delivery of both home broadband services and enhanced customer experiences.
Just under three quarters (74%) of global telco executives responding to the research ranked AI as important or very important for enhancing the connected home experience. Largely driven by its predictive maintenance capabilities, which enable quicker and more proactive issue resolution, AI adoption is continuing to grow across home broadband and network environments. Indeed, 97% of service providers highlighted AI as a key tool in enabling them to analyze customer usage patterns and improve overall delivery.
Consider for example, the capability of AI to proactively identify customers with a propensity to regularly call about recurring device problems. By applying use cases to these individuals, AI can provide proactive care as a first-line touchpoint to reduce, and potentially eliminate the volume of these calls, saving potentially millions of dollars in customer care costs.
Another area where AI is growing in application is within Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) at the edge, with 41% of respondents to The Future of the Connected Home 2025 report saying they anticipate deploying AI and compute power at the edge. Service providers are increasingly seeing the capability to use AI to provide this type of end-to-end view of the entire network as a key point of difference.
The notion of network health and network performance has evolved. With AI, customer experience is no longer defined only by what happens inside a service provider’s core systems. It now extends all the way to the edge and endpoint of what device is in the customer’s hands, home or business (if in an enterprise setting).
It is no longer viewed as somewhere back along the line with a central office, data center or in the cloud; customer experience goes all the way to the edge. So that includes the device information and the interactions that form the core of customer experience, which directly ties in with the Broadband Forum’s TR-369 standard, allowing for features including remote monitoring and troubleshooting, as well as device lifecycle management.
With AI, the model now for capturing and reflecting these details is changing as so much more can be logged and turned into quick, automated responses without having to bring it all back to a common repository such as a data lake. Some 62% of respondents to The Future of the Connected Home 2025 report cite this as the current operational bottleneck.
Service providers can now proactively sift through customer data and respond right at where the interaction points are. As a result, the closer they can respond, the more intelligence can be pushed towards that edge, ultimately reducing delays in response, and helping to federate the intelligence of the network to very specific customer use cases.
This is one of the biggest changes we have seen in terms of broadband service providers looking to utilize AI to upgrade their toolkit, representing a shift away from simply adding AI to analytics in a core centralized way. Another aspect is the introduction of agentic AI as an assistant to improve customer interactions and the intelligence of the workforce.
However, this is not about replacing staff, rather using AI in an assistive and hybrid way as a type of tool enhancement, particularly for newer team members who have not yet built up the years of customer experience of more senior colleagues.
With the latter, the idea of utilizing agentic AI is to try and spread, share and increase that knowledge so expertise is stored, reused and learned from. Here, what AI brings to the table is not that it’s necessarily better (at least not at this point!), but the speed in which it can quickly retrieve and return that information, then assimilate, correlate and bring it into a centralized and summarized view.
In many respects this is where the telco industry is mirroring what we’re already seeing in disciplines such as science and healthcare in making use of AI. Locating points of interaction and providing insights into areas that might not have been considered. Whether it’s customer care, point of sale or troubleshooting, people still like to talk to people and have that interaction and empathy that they won’t get from a machine. The only difference now is that the person providing that can do so much more effectively armed with insights from AI.
However, this shift does require consideration of cultural expectations and differing demographics. Some customers are comfortable with digital interactions and proactive maintenance (and willing to pay more for the premium experience); others prefer a basic, human-led experience. AI must therefore be introduced with transparency and optionality.
Ultimately, for any of this proactive engagement to be successful, it depends on if the service provider has the knowledge of and access to critical information such as device health, and the type and frequency of customer interactions.
For example, a network issue may be impacting multiple devices, but it can be very personal to what is going on with a specific customer. Knowing that upfront and building rapport accordingly is a big differentiator from a customer care perspective.
The key moving forward is to move beyond reactive support to proactive engagement by strategically deploying AI across the entire customer lifecycle, supported by governance, privacy frameworks and clear guardrails. The service providers that embrace this paradigm shift will be the ones best positioned to thrive, moving from cost savings to value delivery and increasing the value of the brand itself. Omdia’s data reinforces this:
- 68% of service providers plan to invest in proactive care AI within the next 12 months.
- 59% cite reducing care costs as a primary driver, and
- 72% say AI-enhanced diagnostics will define competitive differentiation by 2026.
This shows that proactive AI is not simply a technology trend: it is becoming a baseline expectation for operational excellence, cost optimization, and customer experience leadership.
In an increasingly competitive broadband landscape, the “so what” is clear: operators that deploy AI to anticipate, rather than react, will deliver experiences that customers feel, not just outcomes that networks measure.