A new report, Telecoms Customer 2035, dismantles three decades of failed orthodoxy in the telecoms industry.

According to the report, hundreds of billions spent on 5G, full fibre, cloud and generative AI have delivered flat revenues, stubbornly high churn, and customers who switch the moment a cheaper deal appears.

The real crisis isn’t technology, pricing or business model. It’s the relationship telcos have with their customers. Report author Teresa Cottam, Chief Analyst at, Omnisperience, dismantles the myths:

· Loyalty never existed – it was inertia in disguise

· NPS is broken and actively misleads boards

· Generative AI alone will accelerate irrelevance, not prevent it

· The killer app of 2035 is already here – telcos just haven’t woken up to it yet.

The world in 2035

By 2035, typing will be dead. Voice will be king (again) and personalised voice interface layers will make it far easier to interact with technology (think Scottie on the Enterprise!).

This is a huge opportunity for telcos, as they have natural advantages to dominate this business area, such as a deep heritage in voice, the global infrastructure needed to deliver it and the relationship with the customer. Cottam argues that unlocking this opportunity requires an urgent reset of customer relationships today.

“By 2035 voice will be the dominant interface,” says Cottam. “Telcos are currently the only companies that can deliver trusted, low-latency, sovereign voice at global scale. But this vast, new business only unlocks once they’ve fixed their relationship with their customers and stopped treating customer dialogue as a cost centre rather than an opportunity.”

Without a reset, automating current customer support processes by adding AI risks delivering faster bad relationships.

“Think about it. We’re approaching customer relationships with thinking straight out of the era of CD-ROMs, Nokia 1011s and VHS videos. And we wonder why we’re getting it so wrong,” Cottam says.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s still time for a serious intervention to get customer relationships back on track. Telecoms Customer 2035 challenges the out-of-date thinking, outlines the new opportunities for telcos and explains how things are set to rapidly evolve with the introduction of AI. “Without fast and significant change in the way we approach customer relationships, we’re going to miss the boat again,” Cottam warns. “This book is deliberately provocative to get everyone talking about what really matters – not 5G, 6G or even AI, but our relationship with our customers.”

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Categories: AI, Articles, Broadband, Consumer Behaviour, Markets, MNO, Mobile, Research, Telco

Tags: AI, Customer, Omnisperience, telcos, Teresa Cottam