#call-volume-trends

#call-volume-trends

In 1952, Japanese technologist Masaru Ibuka learned that Western Electric was releasing its transistor patents to the public for $25,000, a significant investment for his struggling firm. This opportunity would allow access to essential patent portfolios and technical information, crucial for innovation in electronics.

AT&T is framing the launch as a broader overhaul of its digital customer experience, not just a visual refresh. In its announcement, the company said the app was built around customer demand for "simplicity, speed, and control," and introduced a GenAI assistant for shopping and support.

In a phone call, the assistant gets activated by the 'Hey Magenta' wake-up word. It listens only to the question you ask. If you want to ask something else later in the conversation, you have to activate it again.

Consumers are not passively renewing mobile plans. They are actively evaluating them, comparing value, scrutinizing pricing, and reassessing providers more frequently. Mobile is evolving from a static utility into a dynamic service relationship, and the next era will belong to those who reduce complexity, communicate transparently, and activate seamlessly.

You don't need to pay for expensive software tools in order to analyze what people are saying about your brand online, according to Jazmin Griffith, the founder of social listening agency Que Lo Que. Social listening, or the act of tracking customer sentiment through social media comments and posts, is an important practice for any business with an online presence. "There's a lot of data out there," John Box, the CEO of Meltwater, a SaaS platform that provides social listening services, previously told Inc.

"Mr. Watson, come here, I want to speak to you." With these words, Alexander Graham Bell revolutionized communication. They were the first words to be intelligibly transmitted over distance the first telephone call. On February 14, 1876, Bell applied for a patent for his invention, signaling the rise of spoken communication as the primary way people stay connected. Real-time, long-distance communication stunned those experiencing it for the first time.

The self-described "Un-carrier" announced on Wednesday that beta signups were now available for live call translation powered not by an app or device-level capability, but AI that lives directly on the T-Mobile network. Eligible T-Mobile customers using a phone connected to 4G LTE or 5G - from flagship smartphones to bog-standard flip phones - can activate the feature by dialing * 87 *, with only one caller required to be on the carrier's network. Access is currently limited to customers admitted into the beta.

These AI tools drive profitability because they reduce outages, save energy, and obviate the need for manual intervention said Chetan Sharma, CEO of Chetan Sharma Consulting, who contributed to the report. The focus on AI-native networks and autonomous operations has overtaken customer service optimization as the leading use case for investment, according to findings from the firm's fourth annual State of AI in Telecommunications survey. The report also showed that AI has become profitable for 90% of telco operators.

According to a new survey by Salesforce, consumers spent a record-breaking $1.29 trillion globally, and $294 billion in the U.S., amid higher average selling prices, up 7% year-over-year, during the recent holiday season. Sales growth reached 7% globally and 4% in the U.S., indicating that consumer appetite remained strong from the start of the season through the end. Order volumes were also up, 3% globally and and 1% in the U.S.

"Despite generational differences in the types of problems experienced, one thing is clear: wireless network quality is strong," Carl Lepper, J.D. Power senior director of technology, media and telecom, said in a prepared statement about the mobile study.

The complexity of the sales sector has grown immensely in recent years. Nowadays, buyers are more informed, competition is more brutal, and sales processes are made up of multiple and diverse stages. All of these changes have made it so that businesses, and specifically their sales departments, can no longer rely on ad hoc training or legacy knowledge. Instead, they need targeted and continuous training that supports their development, aligns with organizational objectives, and adapts to the industry's frequent changes.

Abandon your focus on keyword optimization and start optimizing for citations Your human talent should focus on risk removal instead of pitching By the time a human conversation happens, the decision is often 80% to 100% made Businesses no longer find value in standard blog posts, which AI technology has made obsolete The traditional B2B growth engine is now showing signs of "leaking oil." The predictable path to revenue has followed a straight line for many years.

How are marketers making sure the language they use around AI and the experiences they offer prospects and customers are meaningful? After testing hundreds of AI messages with customers and prospects, one truth stands out: Beneath most AI claims is a quiet fear about human value. The lesson is to be specific about business value and how AI supports, not replaces, people.

Opensignal's research found that T-Mobile led all carriers for reliability, experience, consistent quality, and access to 5G. Consistent quality is defined as how well a network supports the requirements for common applications that users consider acceptable to complete various "demanding" tasks, though Opensignal doesn't define what "demanding" is in this context. Reliability, on the other hand, refers to the ability of users to connect to and complete everyday tasks.

B2B buyers now enter the purchasing process already considering at least one vendor. Increasingly, AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft 365 Copilot inform their choices. These tools are becoming one of the first places buyers turn for vendor insights. If a company doesn't appear in these AI-generated answers, it risks being excluded from buyer shortlists. To improve visibility, companies must strengthen their answer engine optimization strategies by leveraging their customers.

They said it would never happen, but of course it was always going to - ads are coming to ChatGPT. Shirley Marschall takes a look at this little bit of history repeating... Guys, honestly, there won't be ads... Jeff Bezos: "Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service." Elon Musk: "I hate advertising." Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet.

There were specialists monitoring dashboards, tuning AI behavior, debugging API failures, and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions over chat and email (resetting passwords, explaining features, troubleshooting one-off issues, and escalating bugs) was now writing Python scripts to automate routing. Another was building quality-scoring models for the company's AI agent. This seemed markedly different from the hyperbole I'd been hearing about customer support roles going away in large part due to AI.

STL Partners predicts one AI-related growth area among telcos but warns of a slower adoption or pullbacks in three others. First, the AI optimism: Telcos will increasingly adopt voice-based AI, analysts believe. Already, some of the biggest global telcos are using embedded voice assistance in AI channels for enterprise customers. In 2026, telcos are likely to adopt voice technologies for customer calls as well. Immediate benefits could include live translation and integration of digital assistance services.

In the 2026 installment of the State of Digital Media Benchmark, the media consultancy analyzed the governance protocols of 143 major advertisers representing about $35 billion in annual spend. One chilling if unsurprising conclusion: agencies blame clients for being so siloed the agency doesn't have clarity on client data, which is arguably the lifeblood of modern digital marketing. It all translates to what the report cited as a "dangerous disconnect between 'having data' and 'having visibility', particularly among the world's largest advertisers, those spending at least $1 billion in media annually.