Half of T-Mobile’s Customer Calls Are Now AI

T-Mobile’s ultimate goal is to “surprise and delight customers” by solving their problems before they even need to talk to a human customer service agent, Julianne Roberson, director of AI engineering at T-Mobile, said at the AI Agent Conference in New York City on Tuesday. 

In practice, that means shifting from reactive service to proactive problem-solving, where AI anticipates friction points and removes them before the customer even notices. The company also added a layer of AI to handle customer inquiries, with voice AI answering the phone for half of customer service calls. 

“I’ve been at T-Mobile for 10 years,” Roberson said. “There’s a culture of loving our customers and putting customers first. We want to better understand customers and fix pain points with AI.”

Customers increasingly interact with AI systems capable of understanding natural language and resolving common issues on the spot, she said. This shift allows human agents to focus on more complex or emotionally sensitive cases, while AI handles routine inquiries instantly and at scale. 

T-Mobile first went all-in on AI in 2024, Roberson said. The conviction and competitive pressure to do more came from top leadership. Now, AI is handling over 200,000 conversations a day.

Roberson said that T-Mobile’s aim for using AI is to create a future where customers don’t have to call the company with complaints — things just work. She pointed to T-Life, an AI-driven T-Mobile app that allows customers to shop, compare plans and manage their accounts and devices, as an example of AI at work. She highlighted that the app was so easy to use that even an 80-year-old woman could use it to buy phones for her grandchildren.

Inviting critiques

The journey to implementing AI wasn’t easy. “There were a lot of naysayers,” Roberson said. 

“When we first launched our chatbot, we disabled the ability to take screenshots because we didn’t want people to take screenshots and post them on Reddit,” she revealed. “Our CEO said no, let them take screenshots and critique us.”

Roberson considers her team of about 30 people like a “little startup” within a huge enterprise. At the end of 2025, T-Mobile employed approximately 75,000 people in the U.S.

When it comes to what she’s looking for in partnerships with external organizations, Roberson said that technical ability isn’t enough. Her focus is on someone who understands the customer-centric focus at T-Mobile and can show how AI can help enhance those values.

“I care about improving the customer experience and making deeply personal relationships that improve our relationship with our customers,” she said. 

Looking ahead, Roberson sees a future where customer service becomes almost invisible. “The future looks like customers not having to call us and things just working,” she reiterated.