AI has played a key role in helping Frontier grow revenue in its Business segmentThe telco is applying AI to help automate knowledge tasks and identify new prospects for sales staffWith success in the books, Frontier exec Ettienne Brandt said more AI use cases are on the wayTelcos across the board have been fighting for years now to get their ailing Business segments on firmer ground. But to date, only one has had real success in doing so: Frontier. Why? Well, because about a year ago it ditched its shovels in favor of a bulldozer. After all, they do say when you’re in a hole not to keep digging.
By bulldozer, of course, we mean a similarly heavy duty piece of technology: artificial intelligence (AI).
In an exclusive interview, Frontier EVP for the Commercial Segment Ettienne Brandt told Fierce that by applying AI, it’s been able to cut down on time spent by its sales force on knowledge tasks by 90%. It has also been able to boost the proportion of new revenue coming from new clients from a low single digit percentage in 2022 to just under 50% this year.
Thanks in part to these efforts, Frontier’s Business and Wholesale revenue turned a corner into positive growth territory in Q2 2024 and posted accelerated gains in Q3. Meanwhile, AT&T, Verizon and Lumen all saw their Business segment revenues decline over the same period.
In a market rife with AI wannabes, Brandt told Fierce that finding the right vendor – in this case, Elixrr – was key. And rather than putting its AI ambitions through the usual RFP process only to find out down the line that the quote and timelines offered were all wrong, he said Frontier sought to embed Elixrr in its business from the start. Frontier asked Elixrr to spend a few weeks time-motion studies within its business units before coming up with a quote.
And with that upfront work out of the way, Brandt said Frontier was able to create a “map of opportunities” within its business and gating metrics for success it would need to achieve before moving on to each new use case.
Starting lineAccording to a McKinsey study, nearly all of the 130 telcos the firm surveyed are “doing something with” generative AI, with many focused on putting it to work for customer service, network and IT use cases. Marketing and sales applications were less popular among respondents, but McKinsey noted such use cases have some of the biggest impact.
Indeed, Frontier has achieved notable results with its implementations in its B2B sales division.
Brandt said Frontier started with the low-hanging fruit: knowledge work.
“Knowledge management is the easiest one,” he said. “You’re kind of a fool if you don’t do it.”
More specifically, it plugged all of its internal training and systems data into Chat-GPT4o to create an AI agent capable of assisting its sales teams with tasks like order placement and product comparisons. The idea behind that being the more time sales people can actually spend selling rather than looking things up, the better.
This initial use case was a resounding success. Brandt said Frontier had set an internal goal of cutting time spent on non-sales tasks by 80%. When it checked how sales folks trained with the AI agent performed against those doing the same tasks manually, it found a 90% time savings.
With phase one proved out, Brandt said Frontier moved on to using AI to improve the prospecting process. Basically, it stuck all the data it had on network plans, lit buildings, customers, renewal schedules and more into an AI blender. It sprinkled in some data from LinkedIn and other sources to enrich the picture and voila. It had an AI recommendation engine capable of helping its sales staff home in on the most lucrative prospect opportunities.
When Brandt started at Frontier, he said the amount of new revenue generated by new clients was in the mid-single digits. With manual improvements it was able to increase that figure by 4x. By adding AI into the mix it was able to double that number.
Road aheadSo, where will Frontier’s AI push take it next? Well, Brandt said it first plans to extend its prospecting engine all the way through the end of the cash generation cycle (i.e. billing). This will let sales staff intervene if signed contracts get stuck somewhere in the execution process and avoid lost commissions.
In 2025 and beyond, it’ll also look to use AI as a sales coach, for call analysis, further automating the prospecting and contract renewal process and more.
“We’ve got a backlog of opportunity here,” he said.
For other telcos eyeing AI, Brandt offered two pieces of advice.
First, take the time upfront to get your data environment in order. After all, AI is only as good as the data it’s fed. And two, get buy-in from your employees.
Brandt noted that “everybody was very scared when we started this,” with most concerned about whether AI might steal their jobs. But Frontier made a point to have Elixrr sit with its employees and understand their frustrations to come up with solutions that would actually help.
“Making it a bottom-up initiative got buy-in from day one,” he concluded.
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