How Vodafone uses AI

Vodafone's Field Technician Assist is a tool built with the integrator Celfocus on Google Cloud that reads past interventions, work order text, performance data and documents and shows an engineer the three best actions for an incident, before arrival and on site. Engineers rate the suggestions, which feeds later improvements. At TM Forum's DTW Ignite in 2025 a Vodafone customer fulfillment executive reported that repeated site visits fell by 28% and engineers spent ten minutes less per incident on average. Celfocus described the tool as piloted in several Vodafone markets at that time.

Vodafone began working with Eightfold in 2021 and uses its AI to give recruiters more insight into who applies from where, across about 500,000 applications. Carl Clarke, Vodafone's Director of Talent, Learning, Leadership, Skills, People Performance and Talent Acquisition, told UNLEASH at Eightfold Cultivate Europe in June 2024 that candidate satisfaction rose from negative figures to +86 and that he estimates recruiters have saved 16 hours per week in sourcing. The figures are an executive's statements reported by a trade publication, with no method given.

Vodafone Carrier Services launched Scam Signal, an API that analyzes real time network data during a live bank transaction to detect social engineering behind authorized push payment fraud, so banks can stop fraudulent transfers as they happen. It sits in Vodafone's Identity Hub next to the SIM Swap and Number Verify APIs, which use CAMARA open standards. JT Group, working with FICO, was the first channel partner to offer it. In a three month pilot with a UK bank that Vodafone does not name, scam detection improved by 30%.

Vodafone rebuilt its TOBi chatbot on Azure OpenAI as SuperTOBi, launched in Italy and Portugal, with Germany and Turkey announced to follow from July 2024 and other markets later that year. A companion SuperAgent helps human agents search the company knowledge base and, in Ireland, sends the human agent a summary of the online customer conversation so customers do not repeat themselves. Vodafone reports that initial tests at one of its call centers showed a 50% improvement in first time resolution of critical journeys such as complex billing inquiries, and that in Portugal first time resolution on appointment booking rose from 15% to 60%, with billing journeys being added next.

TOBi is Vodafone's digital assistant on the website, the My Vodafone app, messaging and telephony, first launched in Italy and extended to 15 language versions. It handles billing questions, contract updates and simple technical troubleshooting, hands over to a live agent with a summary, and during the pandemic made the same sales offers as human agents, such as data boosts and upgrades. Microsoft reports that TOBi now fully resolves 70% of inquiries arriving through digital channels; an earlier Microsoft story quotes Vodafone on a 12% year on year fall in contacts to call centers after launch.

Vodafone and Nokia jointly developed an Anomaly Detection Service, based on Nokia Bell Labs technology and running on Google Cloud, that detects and troubleshoots irregularities such as mobile site congestion, interference and unexpected latency before they affect customers. After an initial deployment on more than 60,000 4G cells in Italy, it was being rolled out across Vodafone's European network in July 2021, with all European markets planned by early 2022 and plans to apply it later to 5G and core networks. Vodafone expected around 80 percent of its anomalous mobile network issues and capacity demands to be detected and addressed automatically; no measured result was published.

Vodafone ran early machine learning trials in centralized self organizing networks. In Germany, with Huawei, an algorithm found the optimal voice over LTE settings for 450 randomly chosen cells in four hours, a task Vodafone says would take an engineer around two and a half months. In Ireland, with Cisco, algorithms predicted where 3G traffic would peak in the following hour so the network could rebalance load between neighboring cells; Vodafone reports an average 6 percent improvement in mobile download speed in initial results. Vodafone planned commercial use from its 2018/19 financial year.