With nearly 20% of US communications company engineers aged 55 or over and just 6% under 24, communications providers are facing major ageing workforce challenges. With retirement set to outpace recruitment by 2032! The challenge for comms organizations is to retain and scale workforce expertise, and it’s a job that AI and its digital toolset are well able to do, as Markus Persson, Global Industry Director, Telecom, IFS, explains.
But integrating AI tools into workflows is not as simple as it sounds. A one-size-fits-all company approach cannot replace human judgement. The answer lies in integrating digital tools to work in parallel with workers to boost their output and retain operational experience.
With over 52% of comms organizations already reporting using AI, the communications industry is one of the industry leaders in AI adoption. But organizations must not view AI as a quick-fix, plug-and-play tool when integrating it into workflows! MIT research shows that AI will augment rather than replace most occupations, with impact arriving through task reallocation and new complements.
It is clear that a successful AI integration in the communications workforce will depend on how comms organizations transition workers from traditional working processes to new digital ones.
When organizations look to introduce change, especially technological changes that impact ways of working and workflows, the immediate concern for many employees is whether they are being replaced. Comms organizations need to demonstrate from the get-go how AI can enable workers to be redeployed to higher-value work, not remove them.
Change management is key to overcome workforce pushback
To gain the buy-in and acceptance of workers, this initial phase is crucial, and it starts before any digital tools are integrated into workflows. Leadership and management need to establish a trusted culture of continuous improvement and inform employees of the benefits of AI at every level of operations. Once employees understand and see how investment is being made not only in technology but in the workers themselves to improve their efficiency and output, they will be less resistant to change.
Change management is crucial at this stage in demonstrating the workforce benefits of AI. This starts with leadership being equipped with the skills to coach AI-augmented work, deploy fusion teams, and create AI ways of working handbooks. At this stage, involving employees can boost acceptance by seeking input and demonstrating how AI can make workflows more efficient, creating a sense of ownership and empowerment. Remember, some of these technicians or dispatchers have been doing the job for years.
To continue building trust beyond the initial pilot phase, a key part of change management is tracking employee feedback and KPIs—from the start, incentives need to be tied to capability building and adoption milestones, whether this be tracking AI literacy, Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) augmentation, time-to-productivity, throughput, and pairing productivity with quality and safety.
Culture beats process in the AI adoption phase
Rather than treating AI as a technical add-on to processes, comms organizations must take a culture-first approach. One that must start from the top of the business, with leadership and HR creating a culture that is trustworthy, governed, and ethical to gain worker buy-in.
When organizations pursue a process-driven integration, they often fail because the one-size-fits-all mindset does not account for human workers. In comparison, with a culture-led integration, AI agents and human workers are seen as complementary partners. AI adapts to individual worker needs—freeing experienced workers from monotonous jobs and giving them more time to focus on value-add tasks, whilst also providing less experienced workers with guidance on how to carry out tasks.
By taking this company-wide approach that focuses on culture over process, organizations can continuously improve by designing workflows that work smoothly across both agents and humans. Cultivating an adaptive mindset ensures AI empowers worker expertise rather than acting as an add-on.
How to make AI the new fount of all communication knowledge
The comms industry is abuzz with new tech—5G, edge computing, and open RAN, that they need to take advantage of, but they are stretching the capabilities of an ageing workforce. And with recruitment getting slower by the day, comms operators cannot afford to take workers away from their tasks for training.
But there’s a new team. AI copilots and agentic AI digital workers, fully equipped with AI tools, are ready to step up and be an institutional knowledge hub to support both experienced workers and recruits.
No surprise then that new research from The Futurum Group and IFS shows the top three use cases for agentic AI cited by communications providers are in dispatch/scheduling (39.8%), service planning (33.9%), and incident triage (32.2%).
Targeting the real pain points
With experienced workers becoming a premium, comms organizations need to focus AI integration on the key pain points and empower experienced workers to maximize skill sets.
Audit trails and reports are a massive headache, with frontline technicians and back-office workers having to fill out pages of paperwork for the simplest of tasks—forcing employees to spend more time documenting rather than applying skills. By integrating AI into audit trails to automate data collection, trace automated decisions back to source, and flag anomalies, organizations can save time, resources, and empower employees to focus on value-added tasks.
Making already valued employees’ lives easier
For experienced workers, the benefits of integrating AI tools are twofold. Not only can digital workers work alongside human operations to take on monotonous tasks such as auditing and reporting, allowing the worker to focus on more complex tasks. This allows comms organizations to focus experienced workers’ time and skills on value-add tasks, not paperwork.
The real value-add, however, comes when these digital workers are also creating a digital knowledge hub that can be utilized to train inexperienced workers and also pass on the operational knowledge of experienced workers without them having to be there.
It’s a win-win! Boosting first-time fix rates—and passing knowledge on
The solution to the ageing workforce challenge is not as simple as replacing experienced workers with recruits. Comms organizations need to look at the bigger picture, and it’s double-pronged!
Operational knowledge requires years of experience and is often learnt firsthand. For comms companies, recruitment is struggling to keep up with a retiring workforce while demand for digital skills is surging.
This is where integrating digital tools comes to the fore to train and pass on operational knowledge without the need for an experienced worker. Digital tools such as AI co-pilots or digital worker platforms can ensure that inexperienced workers are not wasting time trawling through manuals looking for answers. The digital tools can answer any questions, troubleshoot, and locate procedures on the spot in a matter of seconds.
Just as importantly, these more digital, AI-enabled ways of working can help make communications providers more attractive to the next generation of workers. Younger employees are accustomed to intuitive digital tools, real-time access to information, and technology-supported ways of working.
By modernizing frontline and operational roles with AI copilots, digital workers, and mobile-first workflows, communications providers can present the industry as a more innovative, technology-led career choice rather than one defined by legacy systems and manual processes.
First-time fixes? Not a problem because inexperienced workers can be guided through a solution in accordance with rules and regulations by the AI tools, instead of having to interpret a manual with information they could misunderstand.
AI and digital workers come to the fore to solve comms workforce headaches
The ageing workforce challenges and new technological demands facing comms providers are mounting. To turn the tide, comms organizations need to integrate digital tools powered by AI, but only those organizations that have the right change management and culture in place will see a successful integration and the most impact on workforce efficiency and output.
Picture Courtesy: Pixabay.com
