Salesforce has announced the launch of Agentforce for Communications, a vertical solution with telco-specific AI agents designed to automate and improve telecommunication tasks in CX, sales, and business operations.
By using real-time data and natural language understanding to take actions and provide insights, this will enable telecom companies to tackle unnecessary technical debt and allow service agents to focus on complex tasks, improving productivity in customer interactions.
The CRM giant reveals that this set of AI agents was launched in response to telecom companies seeing slow ROI and rising customer churn despite heavy investments, allowing these businesses to move away from repetitive workloads and fragmented systems to improve their CX.
David Fan, SVP & GM for Communications at Salesforce, explains how these AI agents will allow telecom companies to operate more efficiently and generate higher revenue.
“With Agentforce for Communications, we’re helping telecom companies work smarter by connecting every part of their business, from sales to customer service to field operations, with AI agents that work 24/7 alongside human teams,” he said.
“Whether it’s resolving billing disputes, managing subscriptions, or accelerating complex B2B quotes, we’re enabling telecom companies to compete in the AI era by improving efficiency, driving growth, and freeing teams to focus on what matters most.”
Efficiency and Retention Are Now Critical
In many regions where customers have access to more than one telecom service, operators will likely compete for the same pool of users, with many often cutting prices or offering short-term promotions to attract rival customers.
Whilst this can temporarily boost sales, this can erode ARPU, motivating customers to frequently switch providers when better deals arise.
In the report ‘Perspectives from the Global Telecom Outlook 2024 – 2028′, telecom industry growth is projected to slow down to 2.9% by 2029.
This means that the total income for telecom companies is expected to rise only slightly each year from services such as mobile, broadband, and data.
As the primary drivers for many telecom companies, these services typically generate the most recurring revenue, meaning slower growth can dangerously limit overall expansion, increase pressure on margins, and reduce a company’s capacity to offset rising infrastructure and operating costs.
Furthermore, customer churn is expected to reach 40% by the end of the decade, meaning the stability of telecom services will depend increasingly on retaining existing customer rather than relying on new subscriber growth.
And with unnecessary costs and delays caused by manual effort, telecoms will need to adopt industry-designed tools to manage workloads and allow service agents to focus on regaining customer retention and creating value beyond basic connectivity.
Agentforce for Communications
Agentforce for Communications is a suite of AI-driven tools designed specifically for telecommunications companies to tackle manual work tasks.
Built on Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 platform, the vertical solution can automate routine tasks, offer real-time insights, and improve customer engagement across sales, service, and operations.
The suite is also integrated with telecom data systems such as CRM, OSS, and BSS so telecom agents can operate with deep contextual information.
By deploying agents to handle operations faster and connect data with action, this will shift human teams toward higher-value tasks.
Billing Resolution Agent
This tool is designed to help service teams quickly analyse and resolve billing disputes by centralizing billing data from multiple systems.
By removing the need for manual data gathering, this reduces overall delays and errors in billing issues, improving customer trust, satisfaction, and the likelihood of retention.
Service Level Objective (SLO) Insights Agent
Service teams can use this tool to monitor network performance against service commitments, such as uptime and repair SLA.
It provides teams with compliance trends and identifies root causes of issues as well as enabling proactive troubleshooting before problems reach the customer.
This allows telecoms to deliver on promised service quality levels and reduce service-related churn.
Quoting Agent
This tool supports sales teams in winning business more efficiently by simplifying the process of creating complex telecom quotes.
Due to the complex nature of telecom pricing, quotes require manual data entry, cross-checking, and validation, with increased time spent and error risks.
Using live data to generate valid, compliant quotes reduces quoting mistakes and turnaround time.
Site Grouping Agent
This tool automates customer deal management, applying telecom business policies and constraints, and generates valid groupings in line with those rules.
By connecting CRM, quoting, and operational systems, this ensures the created groupings are technically valid and commercially accurate.
The agent can also interpret flexible instructions and adapt to grouping logic based on previous context, not solely relying on predefined templates.
Guided Selling Agent
This tool provides real-time recommendations to sales and field technicians during live customer interactions for upselling or cross-selling telecom products and services.
By identifying relevant offers such as higher-tier service plans or add-ons, this allows sales conversations to be more informative and efficient.
This supports customer retention by further personalizing the customer journey, increasing customer satisfaction and trust.
Ryan Asdourian, EVP & Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, Lumen Technologies, and Agentforce customer, helped the telecom company move from maintaining legacy infrastructure to operating as a more automated, revenue-focused technology business.
“Our transformation from a legacy telco to a modern technology company required us to dismantle decades of technical debt and a ‘Frankenstein’ infrastructure,” he explained.
“By building our agentic enterprise on Salesforce, we have moved beyond simple efficiency to radical automation, saving $5.6 million in our first year alone.
“Agentforce is the engine reclaiming more than 300 hours of productivity for our teams every week, allowing us to pivot from managing manual complexity to focusing entirely on revenue-generating innovation.”
The Role of Vertical Solutions in Telecommunications
Salesforce’s release of Agentforce for Communications highlights a growing CX trend: more providers are offering vertical solutions to dominate specific markets, and purpose-built sector tools are becoming more sought after than one-size-fits-all platforms.
Salesforce has previously released similar industry-specific Agentforce offers, including the public sector and manufacturing, and is now broadening its vertical solutions strategy to sectors such as telecom with targeted AI agents.
As many sectors now operate under increased regulation, specific workflows, and technical requirements, vertical solutions reduce the cost and implementation burden of heavy customization.
This allows organization to launch products and services faster as the system will already reflect the common operational patterns in that sector.
In the telecom sector specifically, many operators continue to rely on legacy systems whilst trying to handle modern commitments, increasing workloads and less customer focus, resulting in higher customer churn.
As industries begin to mature in the age of AI, organizations will need to focus on precision and operational control, as well as reduce unnecessary costs so customer demands can be met more effectively.
