James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello and welcome to TelecomTV. I'm James Pearce and I'm in Copenhagen for DTW Ignite. I'm delighted to be joined today by Tiago Rocha da Silva, who is the Chief Commercial Officer at Zain KSA from Saudi Arabia. Thank you so much for joining me today. Let's dive in — why don't you tell us about your role at Zain?

Tiago Rocha da Silva, Zain KSA (00:24):
Of course. Well, first of all, thank you very much for the invitation, James. I've been working with Zain since 2018. I'm currently the Chief Commercial Officer in the company. I manage all of the consumer business domains such as marketing, product, communications, customer care, customer experience, and sales channels. Yeah, looking after the P&L for consumers.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:47):
Zain recently announced its AI Centre of Excellence. Obviously AI is a really big topic at the moment. Can you tell us what this is and why it's important for your digital transformation?

Tiago Rocha da Silva, Zain KSA (00:57):
Look, I think no one will challenge me if I say that over the past 10 years, there isn't one country that has been changing more, innovating more, automating and modernising government or private entities than Saudi Arabia. And a lot of this was created and empowered by Vision 2030, which has now been running for around 10 years. A lot of changes have been happening, focusing on improving the quality of life of people — modernising, innovating, automating processes from both a government and a private sector perspective. So our Centre of Excellence is an attempt by Zain to enable and be a catalyst for all of these changes happening in the country. We basically want to be an orchestrator for providing all of the use cases — whether for consumer, for B2B enterprise, or internal use cases that can be very relevant for improving efficiency in finance, procurement, HR, you name it.

(02:04):
So this area should be the catalyst that orchestrates — internally but also for our customers — what we believe will be the most relevant AI use cases. Many are being deployed already, but definitely over the next one, two, three years they will be everywhere.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (02:20):
It sounds like this AI journey is really, really important. Can you talk us through how the use of AI is impacting digital transformation — what's different now compared with, say, two or three years ago?

Tiago Rocha da Silva, Zain KSA (02:32):
I think from a commercial perspective, AI is going to change the foundation of telecom providers. For many years, we as an industry have been focusing on creating new products, launching new products, and then trying to find customers for those products. And I think AI is going to allow us to reverse this logic. We're going to start by understanding, individualising and profiling customer needs and expectations — and then dynamically, in context, creating products that will cater to, satisfy, and solve the problems of those customers. So I think the whole industry is going to have to change. We're going to go from segmentation to individualisation, from campaign launches to engagement with our customers, from connectivity to trying to solve customers' problems. AI is what is basically making sense of a lot of data — data that we as telecom providers believed we were very good at dealing with, until we started thinking about implementing use cases.

(03:37):
Then we realised that the quality of data we have — and actually a lot of data we don't have — is not being stored anywhere. So this obliges us, to be honest, to focus a lot on enhancing the quality of the data we have, gathering everything, making it accessible in real time so that we can build AI use cases and transform internally the way that we work — but also impacting our customers significantly. I think the operator of the future is not going to be launching a campaign for two million customers. It's going to be launching eventually two million products for two million customers. We'll be looking at segments of one — not prepaid versus postpaid, or youth versus family, or consumer versus enterprise. We are used to being a segments company; we will become an individuals company.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (04:35):
So what does this all mean for the way in which an operator like Zain interacts with those customers?

Tiago Rocha da Silva, Zain KSA (04:41):
Yeah, that's a very good point. Look, I think there are two ways that we can approach using AI to enhance the lives of our customers. We can become a faster, rigid company — what I like to call it — meaning we look at the things we do day-to-day, some processes, try to automate them, try to be much faster, become more efficient, save a few costs here and there. But if we don't change the way we work, we'll just become a faster, rigid company. Now, the power of AI is that it will allow us to change our commercial models. Let me give you an example. If we just want to be a faster rigid company and we look at traditional customer care processes — where the customer calls us, we listen to the problem, we try to solve it, and then we provide feedback back to the customer — with AI, we can automate all of this process.

(05:36):
We can listen to the customer, provide the agent a near real-time solution, sometimes even provide the fix itself and inform the customer. We can go from three minutes to resolve a problem down to 20 seconds. Perfect — we save a lot of money. But I think the main enhancement, the main impact that AI can provide, is not only by automating and becoming faster. It's by allowing us to predict that something is going to happen — to detect automatically in near real time that a problem is there, and provide the fix sometimes automatically, or provide the people who can carry out the fix with the solution that needs to be done, and inform the customer if they're really impacted. Sometimes they're not even impacted — they don't need to know that something happened. So we will, instead of providing faster and automated customer care, be focusing on avoiding customer care altogether.

(06:34):
And this is where I think AI is really going to allow us to change the commercial model, instead of just becoming a faster rigid company.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (06:42):
That's really interesting. So maybe you can talk us through what this means for the kinds of services that Zain can develop and offer for its customer base.

Tiago Rocha da Silva, Zain KSA (06:50):
As I was saying, AI at the end of the day is about making sense of a lot of data. Look at how telco operators used to — and actually still — work today. From a marketing point of view, there are people looking at transactions, usage patterns, devices utilised, location, nationality, a lot of socio-demographic information about our customers, so that we can try to understand and eventually predict what they will do. But all of this process is mainly manual. We have data scientists and marketers looking at everything, trying to understand all of that. And this is where we are trying to improve the way that we segment our customer base — but there will always be gaps. It will always take time to convert this information into an actual tailored product. So I think what AI is going to change, from a marketer's point of view, is that the understanding of millions and millions of data points will be much faster and automated.

(07:53):
We will not need to rely on manual queries or data treatments — AI algorithms and machine learning will allow us to do this at a much faster pace and at a much bigger scale. Products will be created dynamically.

(08:15):
We will be able to approach customers contextually and in near real time, to become much more relevant — on the channel that makes sense to them, at the moment when they're triggered to purchase.

(08:27):
And all of this is going to be empowered by AI. So instead of doing all of this manual work — building products, launching campaigns — we will start processing a lot more data, predicting customer needs, understanding customers in detail, focusing not on big or mass segments but on individualisation, contextual pricing, next best action, and dynamic bundling. We will focus on millions of products for millions of customers instead of a preset catalogue of 20 mobile products. So this is where we are heading. When it comes to product and individualisation, and when it comes to customer care — as I said, we do want to automate and become faster whenever the customer is reaching out to us. But the main priority we have in customer care is actually to detect in real time, or even predict, that an issue is going to happen or most likely will happen — predict that a customer might be unhappy and might churn — and then immediately, at the right moment, we address the problem, try to solve it internally, or try to retain the customer before they take the action to leave.

(09:44):
So instead of making it faster, we'll try to avoid, predict, and individualise the approach. Of course, internally we'll have to change a lot the way that we work. And I think the main challenge is not necessarily technology — the main challenge is actually cultural. Instead of just focusing on improving processes, we are going to have to actually change the way that we work. A lot of commercial models will stop existing because AI will make them obsolete. We don't need that way of working anymore. We'll definitely need new skills, and this is where the Centre of Excellence will also help us. But yeah — I see AI as the biggest transformation that lies ahead of us.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (10:28):
That sounds really exciting. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Tiago Rocha da Silva, Zain KSA (10:31):
My pleasure. Thank you very much for the invitation.