Openreach Improves UK Customer Engagement via New Agentic AI Tech

Network operator Openreach (BT), which is busy rolling out their new full fibre broadband network across the UK, claims to have reduced missed engineering appointments and inbound contact volumes by one-third after they adopted proactive AI (Artificial Intelligence) agents from NiCE Cognigy – redesigning customer engagement across some 15 million customer journeys.

Just to recap. Openreach is busy investing up to £15bn to deploy their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband technology across 25 million UK premises by the end of December 2026. After that, there’s a further ambition to reach up to 30 million premises by 2030 (the build plan and final coverage target for the 2027-2030 period has yet to be announced).

In order to support this, while also improving efficiency and reducing costs, the network operator has recently been busy making much more use of AI based systems (examples here and here). The latest example extended this to the customer engagement side of the operator’s business, which involves using proactive AI-based agents from NiCE Cognigy (this relates to the original 2024 deployment – here).

The agents were designed to engage directly with customers in a “really personal and individual way“, which could be by text, by email or by phone (this is often initiated by the AI itself, rather than the customer, as it attempts to anticipate needs). The agents can then explain the upgrade, provide regular updates on the order journey and address a “full range” of customer questions. Not to mention being able to do things like book and reschedule appointments etc.

Chris Herbert, Openreach’s Director of Customer Service, said:

“Our proactive AI agents are transforming the broadband experience across the U.K. and delivering tens of millions in financial benefits for Openreach and our customers. By moving to proactive, AI-driven engagement, we’ve improved appointment success, optimized operations, and given customers greater clarity during a complex national upgrade. At this scale, that combination of efficiency and trust makes a meaningful difference.”

A related case study claims that Openreach’s adoption of this technology has already resulted in a 35% reduction in missed appointments and helped to improve the operator’s Trustpilot rating – rising to 4.7 out of 5 from 2.0 (based on hundreds of thousands of reviews after the rollout of proactive AI engagement). Not to mention making annual benefits across revenue retention, revenue generation, and OpEx savings, which is vaguely said to be worth “£ Tens of Millions“.

The use of such technologies is of course nothing new in this sector, where AI is fast becoming a very popular tool, which is fine so long as there’s an easily accessible human fallback for situations where the AI can’t understand or deal with certain issues correctly. But it’s worth noting that customer engagement and communications is usually the retail provider’s responsibility, thus this latest change could perhaps be seen as allowing Openreach to communicate better than they have done in the past with end-users.

On the other hand it’s possibly still a bit of a stretch to suggest that the improvement in their Trustpilot rating can be entirely attributed to this one change.