Mohamed Sami, group CIO at Vodacom, says autonomous AI agents that resolve customer problems without handing them to a human are the next big shift in customer experience – and that it is closer than many think.
Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, which is brought to our readers by NTT DATA, Sami said Vodacom’s chatbots and voice bots already handle a considerable share of customer calls, while AI tools help its human agents find information without jumping between systems.
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“When I say it is the next big thing, it is not something that is happening in years. It’s something that is happening very soon,” he said. How autonomous those agents become, he added, depends on how much intelligence and orchestration sits behind them.
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Sami also discusses:
- Where the line falls between his role and that of the group CTO as network and IT converge;
- Why Vodacom is using small language models to help large models handle isiZulu, Swahili, Amharic and Egypt’s Arabic dialects;
- How a standard set of AI agents across the software development life cycle is lifting developer productivity, and why it hasn’t cost software engineers their jobs;
- How Vodacom is trying to stop AI token bills running away, including orchestrators that route work between expensive, cheap and self-hosted models;
- Why he told the board that cybersecurity is one of the company’s biggest risks, and the programme to rebuild core platforms designed before the generative AI era; and
- What it takes to be a modern CIO, and his advice for a graduate who wants his job in 20 years.
Don’t miss a great discussion on technology in telecoms.
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