Deutsche Telekom Aims to Save 2.5 Billion Euros With A.I.

Deutsche Telekom is putting a big number on its A.I. bet: about 2.5 billion euros in indirect cost savings by 2030, versus 2023. The target was unveiled at the company’s A.I. Investor Day in Bonn, alongside a broader pitch that A.I. should also raise service quality and become a growth business, not just a back-office tool.

The company is aiming at the kind of work that piles up in telecoms: network operations, customer service, software development and administration. By 2027, it expects gross savings of about 1.1 billion euros outside the United States, though that figure does not include the cost of using A.I. itself. In customer service, the chatbot Frag Magenta handled about 2.6 million calls in the first half of the year. In the U.S., customer calls at T-Mobile US have fallen by 55 percent, and A.I. agents now handle 40 percent of customer contacts.

The network side is moving just as fast. Telekom says its RAN Guardian Agent can spot congestion before it bites, including during big events, and has cut response time from several hours to about one minute. Another use case is catching problems during new connections before they become complaints. In those early deployments, the company says complaints are down by 30 percent.

The savings are not meant to sit on a balance sheet. Telekom plans to reinvest part of them into digital transformation and faster fiber rollout in Germany. That ties the A.I. story to a very old telecom story: squeeze the operating costs, then pour some of the gains back into the network.

Revenue is the other half of the plan. Telekom is leaning on European demand for sovereign A.I., where companies and public bodies want to use the tech without giving up control over their data. Its main project there is the Industrial AI Cloud in Munich, and it is also building a platform for small and medium-sized businesses to automate routine work in areas like customer service and logistics. The company expects about 250 million euros in A.I.-related revenue from business customers outside the United States this year, rising to about 800 million euros by 2030.

Employees are being pulled into the shift too. Telekom has given staff tools including AskT, ChatGPT Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot, and says more than 100,000 employees have already been trained. The company’s line is that people will still set goals, review results and own the decisions while A.I. does the grunt work. It has not said how many jobs automation might remove. At T-Mobile US, a separate restructuring will cut about 4,700 positions, though the company ties that to leaner structures and fewer duplicate roles.