Telecommunications provider Vodafone is looking to invest some €140 million ($151 million) in artificial intelligence (AI) systems this year to improve the handling of customer inquiries, the company said on Thursday.
Vodafone said it is investing in advanced AI from Microsoft and OpenAI to improve its chatbot, dubbed TOBi, so that it can respond faster and resolve customer issues more effectively.
The chatbot was introduced into Vodafone's customer service five years ago and is equipped with the real voice of a Vodafone employee.
The new system, which is called SuperTOBi in many countries, has already been introduced in Italy and Portugal and will be rolled out in Germany and Turkey later this month with other markets to follow later in the year, Vodafone said in a press release.
According to the company, SuperTOBi "can understand and respond faster to complex customer enquiries better than traditional chatbots."
The new bot will assist customers with various tasks, such as troubleshooting hardware issues and setting up fixed-line routers, the company said.
Vodafone Germany announced in March that it would cut and relocate around 2,000 jobs, affecting 13% of its workforce.
This decision comes as part of cost-saving measures, which will see Vodafone increasingly turn to AI technology.
For its AI-enhanced chatbot, Vodafone uses a Microsoft product - Microsoft Azure OpenAI - that integrates technology from OpenAI.
Microsoft, as a major investor in OpenAI, can use not only the ChatGPT chatbot, but also OpenAI's DALL-E image generator and the Whisper speech transcription model in its products.
