PegaWorld 2025 Verizon keynote: Orchestrating the Future of Customer Experience with AI

Thank you for being here today. And I also understand a lot of folks have tuned in virtually as well. So thank you to them too. And of course, thank you for everyone tuning in from Verizon. A big hello and a big shout out. So, I'm truly excited here to be speaking at PegaWorld this morning to tell you the story of our transformation. It's one of my most favorite topics. How AI has enabled customer experience transformation within Verizon. So let's dig in a little bit. But before we go, think about the context of where we are in the world today. Technology innovation is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. Right. When we all know that, think about what has happened around us in the last one year. Everything has gone upside down. It's just going to get more and more intense. Customers are going to get a lot more anxious, and they're going to be a lot more demanding of us. The way they interact with each other, with businesses, with society. Everything is going to change. So what can we do? So in recognition of the change, we have to transform internally as well. We have to transform the way we work. We have to transform the way we develop our systems and the way we put together experiences for our customers. So we decided we're going to go all in. We're not experimenting with AI, but we're actually investing in it as a strategic imperative to enable transformation at all frontiers. Employee experience, efficiency, productivity, and most importantly, customer experience.

So AI is at the forefront of everything we are doing at Verizon today. So let me walk you through the story of how this happened. If you think about it, a few years back, businesses were structured very differently. The primary mode of interaction was in physical channels. You would go to a store, go call a call center. And if all else fails, you'll go online. Online was more a backup or a cost effective way. Stores where the primary mode of interaction for our business. You would go into the store, get a device, activate the device, walk out all happy, instantly satisfied and gratified that it's a working device in hand. You do the same thing in a call center, and you would get a device home and you'd activate it. Businesses were a lot more simpler. All we sold as a telco, traditional telco was connectivity. You would get the connection and it would be rocking and rolling right away. Right. And every channel was super optimized to do the work. Soup to nuts in an extremely effective way. They would be able to sell, have the systems, have the processes, have the people. Everything was fine tuned for the store to be super effective. But when you think about it, that had its own drawbacks. Customers who went to a store and then decided to call, or a customer who called a call center and then decided to go online. They had very different experiences because the optimization was within the channel. It was a very siloed experience. There was a very less transfer of data. There was very less context awareness. Right. So you can keep going on down this path. Imagine how that would fly today. So where are we today as a business? When you think about today's businesses, it's completely flipped on its head.

What is an Open RAN augmentation channel in digital is now at the center of all the experiences that customers want from us. Digital on the app, digital on the web, digital via voice, digital via chat. And it just keeps exploding. You have way more interaction modes right now. Customers want to talk to us in a multi-modal format. And then if they really have done their homework, they would then walk into the store or call a call center and get the device. On top of it, they would get the other products, accessories, services, whatever, whatnot that we sell today, right? So it's a lot more complicated, intertwined environment that we live in today. And when you think about how we need to enable the experiences. Customers expect us to be totally aware of their needs, of their interactions in the other channels and be and be at the forefront, ready with information for servicing them at all times. More importantly, our employees also expect the same thing. They want to know when they're talking to a customer. If the customer has reached out to us through other channels as well. So it's a completely different ecosystem we live in today. And think about the transformation we've gone through within this short two slides. What we have discussed is an evolution of how things have changed around us in society, and how customers expect to engage with businesses like Verizon in a very different way.

And that is what we have been able to accomplish. And when you think about how we have accomplished that, we've been able to think through this in a very structured way. We've given it a lot of thought and said, look, traditional telcos had a few things that they did really, really well. You got a device, you activate it, you fulfilled, and you walked out. The next time you spoke to Verizon was when you had a bill or when you had an issue once a month at the most. But that's not where we are today. You want to interact with us multiple times. Our products and services have multiplied. We sell streaming services. We sell other products, accessories. We sell a lot of adjacencies and there are multimodal engagements. So the whole conversation is very different right now. We are not a traditional telco anymore. We are a experienced company that also sells connectivity and other products. And in order for us to deliver this, we had to put a framework together that would really be able to scale and enable us to transform as an applied AI company. So we came up with four critical components, if you will. The first one is we want to be hyper-personalized. We want every interaction the customer has with us to be totally aware of the customer's needs, to be so intimately aware of the customer's products, services, usage, and whatever preferences they have. And when you think about the old way of engaging, we had a one size fits all plan that we would offer to our customers. But now it's very different.

Every customer has their unique lifestyle. And we want to be able to cater to that lifestyle. So instead of one size fits all, it's almost like a version of Verizon for every customer. And that is what we had to set out and create. Gone are the days where we could post a plan and everybody gets it. Now we have to create segments and more importantly, we have to create individualized versions of Verizon for every customer. And that is what we set out to do. The next one is contextualized. We wanted every interaction that every customer has with us to be totally context aware of every previous conversation that the customer has had with us in any channel, in any form, in any mode, and keep it seamless and keep the information flowing fluid so that the customer doesn't have to think twice, or the employee doesn't have to think twice or repeat themselves. Right. Third one seamless and connected. You have many modes of interaction. We do not want to dictate where the customer should interact with us and how they should interact with us. We want to give the choice to the customer on where they want to talk to us, and how they want to talk to us, at what time and when they can stop and pick up a conversation. So we we believe in giving choice, and in order to do that, we need to ensure that you can start a conversation anywhere, pick up anywhere and it in a different channel, completely so seamless and connected conversations. Lastly, be proactive with care. There are a lot of lot of instances where things are not perfect.

You might have questions, customers might have a concern they would want to call us. And the best we can do at that point is to empower our reps with all the information they need to service the customer at the right time, with the right details, and even better, reach out to the customer and surprise and delight the customer with the knowledge that we know that there are opportunities for us to do better. So proactive care was a huge component of what we want to do. And thinking about proactive care that would really enable us to transform customer service to customer advocacy. And these are the four tenets that we put together and said we will create a new Verizon along these lines, a new customer experience along these lines. And having done this together for a few years now, we've been on this journey for a few years now. We've seen enormous transformation in terms of customer results. Think about it. Verizon serves one third of America, and we have hundreds of millions of customers who would want to interact with us on a daily basis, either via their phone or via contacting us through our channels or through any means. We have so much data coming in, and the goal now for us to ensure we process all this information, keep the information ready and provide the right kind of information at the fingertips of our employees and customers. So there are billions of transactions happening in the back office at any given point, and these transactions are enabling business results. Right. So if you think about the amount of processing we have to do on any given day and any given month, we are processing millions of sales conversations and orchestrations at any point.

Customer conversations, customer sales. Then in order for us to provide the right personalized service, we have to always be ready with the next best action. The action could be a communication. The action could be a customer service ticket, the action could be a credit or any form. We want to be ready with the next best action for the customer. Then the third one is the next best offer. In this hyper competitive environment, we want to always be aware of what would a customer like to have in terms of their next offer for them. And we have to process all this information in the back end and create the data ready for us to be able to service the customer at the right time. So all these millions and hundreds of millions and billions of conversations in the back end is enabling us to be very flexible, agile, and have a real time purpose to every conversation. And if you think of how all this came together, we started down this journey a few years back. Right. And I just told you a little bit about how a traditional telco was servicing connectivity and thinking about the traditional telco architecture. And for those who know there are some traditional telco jargons here, right. You have an operating OS, which is the operational support system, which takes care of fulfillment and billing. And then there is the business support system, which takes care of CRM activities. And that is all a traditional telco was, a simple stack. But that cannot serve the needs of today. So in order for us to serve the needs of today and transform the customer experience, we had to rethink our system stack. So if you look under the hood a little bit, we had to rethink how our engagement channels were created.

But more importantly, we had to create a real time orchestration and a decisioning platform. And our partners here, Pega have been very great working with us on that on that front. We created this architecture where you have an end to end, seamless journey manager and an orchestrator and a decisioning hub that provides the next best offer or the next best action, sitting on top of data and insights. So this then creates the traditional AI architecture. Now where you have data, you have insights and you have action all sitting together. And in the old world you would take the data off and create algorithms and models for insights and bring it back for actions. But now what we have done, we put them all together. We've got the algorithms to the data, we've got the insights together, and we have the actions enabled real time. And this has been the unlock for us in creating the best possible outcomes and customer experiences. So where do we go from here? Now? Everybody has heard the word agentic AI, I am sure. And if you think about the AI journey itself, there have been various generations of AI, AI incremental developments. And we've been at AI for more than a decade, right, with the whole traditional AI of prescriptive AI. Then we went down to predictive. And now we are in the world of generative. And we've been doing generative at scale, servicing our customers and reps. And at the doorstep of the next evolution of AI, which is the agentic AI. In order for us to create an autonomous enterprise that can service our customers in real time, we have to build a platform that can take advantage of these evolutions of AI.

And we are right there experimenting with this. And we are. were right. We will be ready to roll at scale once we've figured out how do we interact with our customers and our employees and create a unified experience that brings everybody together cohesively? This platform transformation that we've been through over the last few years has really created the foundation for us to capitalize on all the innovations in AI and be at the forefront of the customer experience revolution. So that is the story of how we have evolved our customer experience transformation at Verizon. To bring it all together, I would say that this is a very exciting journey, right? And we are at the forefront of adoption of every new evolution and every new generation of AI in service of our customers. But we have a very strong commitment and we remain steadfast in our customer commitment and customer experiences. Our commitment is to provide the right innovation at the intersection of humans and AI. Leverage the capabilities of humans, leverage the capabilities of technology, and deliver the right experience for our employees and customers. We believe that by truly orchestrating the future of customer experience, we not only create fabulous technology platforms, but we build strong connections that then empower our customers to live, work, and play every day the way they like. That is our mission. That is our purpose. And we've been able to transform and will continue to do that. Thank you very much for listening.