Kuljesh Puri is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Communications, Media & Technology at Persistent Systems. He brings over 26 years of experience across the software, telecom, and semiconductor industries, together with extensive international exposure and a passion for transformation.
Before joining Persistent, Kuljesh headed the Telecom Product Engineering portfolio at Tech Mahindra. Before that he worked at Harman International, a Samsung company, as Vice President and Global General Manager for the Telecom and Industrial verticals, mandated with defining a growth trajectory for the business. Earlier, Kuljesh spent 15 years in senior business and engineering roles at Aricent in each the B2B and B2C businesses.
Persistent Systems is a world digital engineering and enterprise modernization company that partners with businesses to drive innovation and speed up digital transformation. With deep expertise in software, cloud, and data, Persistent delivers end-to-end solutions across industries, including healthcare, financial services, communications, and technology.
What are probably the most transformative ways you see AI impacting call center operations in telecom and media today?
Traditionally, contact centers have been cost centers designed to handle customer queries. Over time, from phone-based call centers, client service has evolved into multi-channel service centers through chat, emails, and mobile apps. Key innovations like seamless omnichannel experiences, AI-driven multilingual self-service, sentiment evaluation, and predictive churn management aren’t any longer optional—they’re essential. At the identical time, Agentic AI is transforming contact centers into client experience centers by fully handling end-to-end tasks like billing corrections, plan upgrades, or technical troubleshooting without human intervention, going beyond scripted chatbots. Overall, AI is enabling businesses to anticipate client needs slightly than merely reacting to them by switching from reactive support to predictive, personalized and self-improving. The result’s enhanced operational efficiency and the flexibility to drive deeper client satisfaction and loyalty. By reducing costs and improving service, AI is transforming call centers from traditional cost centers into high-value, client-centric hubs that directly impact revenue.
How are predictive analytics, automation, and NLP improving real-time customer interactions?
The mixing of predictive analytics, automation, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionizing how we engage with clients in real time. Predictive analytics allows organizations to anticipate client behavior and offer proactive solutions. Automation hastens processes, ensuring rapid responses to client queries while minimizing human error. However, NLP empowers chatbots and virtual assistants to interact in additional natural, human-like conversations, improving each the standard and speed of service. When combined, these technologies create an environment where client interactions are faster and more personalized—ultimately enhancing the client experience and fostering loyalty.
How does AI contribute to making a more seamless, omnichannel customer experience?
AI is the important thing component of a seamless, omnichannel client experience. It enables firms to integrate interactions across various channels—whether it’s a chatbot on a web site, a conversation on social media, or a phone call to a contact center. By consolidating data from these touchpoints, AI ensures the messaging is consistent and tailored to every client. The true power of AI lies in its ability to personalize these interactions, ensuring that clients receive relevant, context-aware support across channels. This creates a frictionless experience, where clients can move from one touchpoint to a different without losing continuity.
With extensive experience working with telecom and media firms, we’ve got helped organizations leverage AI to streamline customer journeys, improve workflows, and supply a unified experience. This allows clients to create a more seamless, personalized service that enhances satisfaction and drives lasting loyalty.
What are probably the most common pain points organizations face when deploying AI into their call centers?
One in every of the most important challenges organizations face when deploying AI of their call centers is integrating it with legacy systems. Many traditional contact centers, particularly those counting on on-premises solutions, lack the infrastructure to support AI’s advanced capabilities. Migrating to the cloud is crucial to unlocking AI’s full potential, but this transition may be complex and dear. Moreover, AI models require high-quality, well-organized data, which legacy systems often struggle to supply. Ensuring a smooth transition without disrupting the shopper experience is one other significant hurdle. Privacy and security concerns regarding data usage also must be addressed comprehensively.
Organizations need an experienced partner to navigate these challenges—one with a deep understanding of each AI and industry-specific needs. We’ve helped many telecom and media firms modernize their contact centers, overcoming these pain points and ensuring seamless transitions that improve operational efficiency and enhance the general customer experience.
For instance, Persistent collaborated with a number one U.S. telecommunications technology provider to boost their contact center operations. The client wanted to research customer interactions through their conversational AI platform to achieve insights into customer satisfaction and agent performance. We developed a GCP-backed data analytics layer that processed data from over 30 real-time streaming pipelines, handling over one billion messages day by day. This solution provided near real-time insights, helping the client monitor key metrics like caller sentiment and repair satisfaction, ultimately improving customer experience and operational efficiency.
By partnering with experts who understand each AI and the telecom industry, organizations can overcome common deployment challenges, modernize their contact centers, and unlock worthwhile data-driven insights to boost customer interactions and drive operational improvements.
What are a few of the biggest differences in how telecom vs. media firms are adopting AI for client service?
The telecommunications sector has long been a pioneer in establishing large-scale contact centers, driven by the necessity to manage essential services comparable to billing inquiries, latest connections, and troubleshooting connectivity issues. These functions remain central to the industry, and AI is increasingly leveraged to optimize operations in these areas, as they represent a good portion of client support ticket volumes. Given the competitive landscape, many telecom operators also use predictive analytics to anticipate client churn, enabling targeted marketing campaigns and retention strategies.
In contrast, media firms concentrate on AI for various purposes, comparable to detecting account sharing, managing subscriptions, analyzing viewing patterns, curating content, and enhancing client engagement through automated self-service options.
At Persistent, we’ve got worked with each telecom and media firms to tailor AI solutions that meet their distinct challenges. For telecom, we concentrate on improving operational efficiencies and leveraging predictive analytics to drive proactive customer support. For media firms, we aim to boost customer engagement through AI-driven recommendations, content personalization, and self-service automation.
In your experience, what cultural or organizational shifts are essential to completely embrace AI in these sectors?
To completely embrace AI, telecom and media firms must undergo a cultural shift toward becoming data-driven organizations. This requires fostering a mindset of continuous learning and innovation across all departments. AI adoption shouldn’t be just an IT initiative, it requires cross-department collaboration, particularly between IT, client service, and operations. Corporations must spend money on AI talent and concentrate on reskilling their existing workforce to make sure they’ve the talents to administer and work alongside AI systems. Moreover, adopting agile methodologies will probably be crucial to allowing organizations to quickly iterate and optimize their AI solutions. Strong leadership is essential to drive these changes and be certain that AI initiatives align with overall business objectives, particularly improving client experience while driving business results.
How does the acquisition of Starfish Associates strengthen Persistent’s AI-powered contact center and unified communications capabilities?
The acquisition of Starfish Associates significantly enhances Persistent’s position within the AI-powered contact center and unified communications space. This strategic acquisition builds on our existing engineering capabilities within the Contact Center and Unified Communications domain, expanding our AI-driven business transformation expertise and reinforcing our concentrate on operational excellence. Starfish Associates is understood for its cutting-edge Enterprise Communications automation platform, which serves a few of the world’s largest enterprises, including many Fortune 500 firms. When combined with Persistent’s strengths in AI-driven automation, this acquisition allows us to supply much more powerful, integrated solutions that streamline workflows, enhance client engagement, and improve operational efficiency.
Data security and privacy are top concerns for organizations in telecom—how is Persistent addressing these in AI-enabled customer support solutions?
Data security and privacy are critical concerns, especially within the telecom industry, where client data is sensitive and highly regulated. At Persistent, we help telecom firms navigate these challenges by implementing AI solutions that ensure data protection at every step. We support our clients in achieving compliance with global regulations comparable to GDPR, CCPA, and other data protection laws, embedding privacy safeguards inside their AI-powered customer support operations.
We assist clients in integrating robust safety features, including encryption, anonymization, and access controls, to secure data throughout its lifecycle. Moreover, we ensure transparency by helping clients maintain full control over their data, offering clear visibility into the way it’s used and managed. By providing ongoing AI model audits and risk assessments, we be certain that our solutions remain secure, compliant, and adaptable as regulations evolve, giving our clients the boldness to leverage AI technologies responsibly while maintaining customer trust.
Finally, what does success seem like to you in terms of AI-powered client experience for telecom players over the subsequent five years?
Over the subsequent five years, AI will redefine the role of contact centers within the telecom industry. Success will probably be measured by the flexibility of telecom firms to remodel traditional call centers into proactive client engagement hubs. Agentic AI will transform telecom customer experience by proactively resolving issues, offering personalized support, and enabling autonomous service actions across channels. Learning from interactions to adapt in real time ensures faster, smarter, and more human-like engagement, which is vital for customer experience transformation.
By offloading 50%-60% of routine client service tasks to Agentic AI, telecom operators can improve efficiency while allowing human agents to concentrate on more complex issues. Predictive analytics will play a pivotal role in anticipating client needs, while omnichannel integration will ensure a seamless experience across all touchpoints.
At Persistent, we help telecom and media firms implement Agentic AI solutions that drive innovation and improve customer interactions. Our expertise in AI and telecom enables the creation of smarter, more agile contact centers, leveraging data to align with business goals. Looking ahead, our goal is to assist these organizations securely infuse AI across their operations, deepening their reference to customers and positioning them for achievement in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
