As telcos embark on their ambitious journey to become ‘tech-cos’, i.e., becoming platform players, their customer-centricity challenge has come into sharp focus. Despite years of investment in digital channels, analytics platforms, and AI-driven journeys, most customer experiences still feel generic and reactive and are only loosely connected to individual needs. It’s a customer intelligence gap that the industry is still working hard to close.
This disconnect is not due to a lack of data or ambition. Telcos possess more data than almost any other sector—billions of real-time signals from networks, devices, and interactions. Yet, they continue to struggle with the one thing you’d expect them to be great at: turning that data into real insights that improve every moment of the customer experience.
With generative AI raising expectations for proactive experiences, the stakes have never been higher. The real challenge for telecom leaders, therefore, is converting abundant data into real customer understanding—a gap that will ultimately define the industry’s winners and laggards over the next decade.
Poor data usage hampers customer-centricity
Virtusa’s recent study of 300+ U.S. businesses, including 61 telcos, highlights a persistent industry paradox: telcos collect huge amounts of customer data, but nearly three-quarters say they don’t fully use it to make decisions or personalize experiences. This suggests that the problem is not a lack of data, but rather a lack of data readiness.
Customer information is scattered across legacy OSS/BSS, CRM, billing, digital channels, networks, and field ops, leaving leaders with fragmented insights instead of a real-time view of customers. However, what exacerbates the problem is how the data is put to use. Take metadata usage, for example. While 72% of telecom firms report using metadata, only 55% utilize it extensively. This limits telcos’ ability to connect datasets and interpret customer signals in context. In contrast, the most customer-centric organizations exhibit far higher metadata usage, with extensive usage ranging from 69% to 90%. This demonstrates that the more effectively a company utilizes metadata, the more customer-centric it becomes.
This widening metadata gap leads directly to another common misconception—one that often surfaces when telcos consider new technologies for assistance.
To close the personalization gap, strengthen your data foundations
Although new AI technologies, such as genAI, have raised hopes for personalized customer experiences, research by Virtusa highlights a crucial fact: AI cannot compensate for fragmented, low-quality, or inaccessible data. AI works well only when the data it uses is strong and well-organized.
Telecom companies, however, face major obstacles that limit their ability to use AI for personalization:
- Integration challenges (60%), particularly around harmonizing AI with decades-old BSS/OSS infrastructure
- Data privacy and regulatory constraints (45%), which require robust governance in a highly regulated sector
- Poor data quality and availability (43%), which undermines the reliability and scalability of AI models
These constraints demonstrate that success with AI personalization depends more on the quality and readiness of the company’s data than on the sophistication of the AI itself. Until telecom companies resolve their data issues and develop more robust systems, AI will only improve things slightly, rather than delivering significant, game-changing results.
Make customer-centricity an enterprise-wide initiative
Telcos succeeding in personalization today view it as a way of doing business, rather than just a marketing tactic or an AI project. They change how data moves through the company and how decisions are made using that data. The three major changes they make are:
1. Make good data a priority: Having high-quality, reliable, and contextual data is now essential for business success. Companies work hard to organize and manage data effectively so that AI can utilize it properly.
2. Remove silos to enhance accessibility of insight: Personalization happens when teams across functions have access to relevant insights derived from customer data, network activity, usage patterns, digital behavior, service interactions, and billing. With this unified intelligence, they can make real-time, context-aware decisions that predict customer needs before they arise.
3. Institutionalize AI strategy at the C-suite level: The telcos witnessing the greatest impact from AI are the ones where C-suite leaders treat it as a core business priority. When CMOs and CEOs define the purpose of AI, align teams, and enforce strong governance, AI becomes a driver of trust, innovation, and scale.
These shifts fundamentally change how telcos prioritize customers. Personalization becomes less about system outputs and more about a clear strategy, connected data, and strong execution across the business. It’s about aligning leaders, unifying customer insights, and translating those insights into meaningful actions that deliver real value to customers.
What personalization at scale looks like
When telcos strengthen their data foundations and integrate AI deeply into business workflows, they move beyond basic personalization and begin delivering experiences that feel tailored, timely, and even predictive. The industry’s leading organizations are already demonstrating what this future looks like:
- Proactive service resolution, anticipating and resolving network, device, or billing issues before they affect the customer
- Real-time contextual offers, shaped by usage behavior, location, life-stage signals, and intent— far more dynamic than traditional segments
- Intelligent retention models that detect early signals of dissatisfaction and trigger personalized, well-timed interventions
- AI-empowered service interactions, where agents receive real-time recommendations and context to deliver faster, more relevant support
- Seamless journey orchestration, ensuring that every touchpoint builds on the customer’s previous actions and needs
These capabilities enable telcos to move from simply responding to problems to truly anticipating what customers need, creating deeper loyalty, greater lifetime value, and stronger trust in the brand.
Making experiences better with technology
Telecom’s complexity requires solutions shaped for its realities, not generic models. Our work with telcos has consistently shown that AI-driven personalization succeeds only when supported by strong data foundations and domain-aware design.
In this context, Virtusa focuses on enhancing data readiness and responsible AI use to make experiences better with technology, enabling telcos to transition from being data-rich to genuinely insight-driven.
Where telcos go from here
The future will belong to operators that can turn their vast data into real-time customer intelligence and translate that understanding into experiences that feel distinctly personal and adapt autonomously as customer needs evolve.
As networks achieve near parity, digital channels converge, and expectations accelerate, traditional differentiators lose their power. In this new landscape, personalization is no longer a feature or a competitive edge; it becomes the strategic backbone of how a telco creates value, earns loyalty, and stays relevant in a rapidly evolving market.