Deutsche Telekom is pulling the automated phone menus off its customer service lines and putting AI agents in their place. Chief AI officer Kartik Sheth said Thursday at HumanX in Amsterdam that the share of customer interactions that never reach a human is rising by one or two percentage points a month, The Next Web reported.
“There is no argument that replacing an IVR with AI gives you better experience,” Sheth said during an onstage conversation with Business Insider’s Hugh Langley. An agent answers around the clock in 40 to 60 languages with no hold time, and it sorts calls better than a keypad menu does, he said. In some of the company’s markets callers already never hear the menu; in others that will be true within months.
The rollout spans 10 European countries, from Poland to Greece, with Germany the largest. Each has its own tech stack, languages, accents and regulations, according to Sheth.
Easy to 40%, hard after that
When Deutsche Telekom switches an agent on for a new use case, it handles no more than 20% of those calls at first. A week later that is 24% or 25%, then 28%, and it reaches about 40% within a couple of months.
Going from 40% to 60% is harder, Sheth said, 60% to 80% is really hard, and anything above 80% is really, really hard, because that is where calls combine several problems and need an experienced person. Simple jobs such as checking and rebooting a router or explaining a high bill now go to AI agents, while complex calls go to humans. Because older back-end systems weren’t built for this, the company adds adapters and caching; a router reboot can take 30 to 60 seconds, which used to mean hold music.
Sheth said product goals are now framed as evaluation scores and guardrails rather than features. “We’ve gone from features as the primary currency to evals as the primary currency and guardrails,” he said. The company works with Decagon and other startups but builds its own evals and tooling, exposing an MCP layer instead of raw APIs so it can switch vendors if the technology changes.
For customer care, the leading indicator is the share of interactions AI handles without a human, and Sheth expects it to keep climbing for the next year or two as customers get used to AI, models improve and more internal systems open up to agents.
Live translation on the network
Deutsche Telekom also showed a call assistant in Barcelona earlier this year and is on track to launch it before the end of the calendar year, Sheth said. It translates calls in real time without special hardware, as long as one of the two callers is on the company’s network, and it can transcribe calls and take web actions such as booking a meeting slot. The company asks both parties for consent before it transcribes or translates.
“When the first time you do a real time translation on the phone network, it’s goosebumps,” Sheth said.
An independent tracker backs up the breadth of the effort. TeckNexus Intelligence, which reviewed AI agent deployments at 50 operators, found Deutsche Telekom has the most complete program of any of them, with evidenced activity in customer experience, network operations, radio access network automation and back-office IT. Customer service is where most operators start: 46 of the 50 have at least one verified customer-facing agent, though TeckNexus found none has taken humans fully out of the loop.
Next, Sheth said, he expects the agent to act more like a personal relationship manager that does things for the customer, such as switching off roaming.
WebProNews is an iEntry Publication