Düsseldorf (dpa) - Vodafone is investing around 140 million euros this year in artificial intelligence (AI) systems from Microsoft and OpenAI to improve the way it responds to customer inquiries. By using advanced AI, the chatbot "TOBi" responds faster than before and solves customer queries more effectively, the company announced in Düsseldorf.

The chatbot was introduced in Vodafone's customer service five years ago and was equipped with the real voice of a Vodafone employee. Last year alone, the system received eight million customer enquiries in Germany and resolved around 65% of them independently without the need for a human employee.

The use of OpenAI technology in Microsoft's Azure cloud environment is intended to further improve these figures. "TOBi" reacts faster than before and resolves customer concerns more effectively. This is based on experience from Portugal and Italy, where Microsoft Azure OpenAI is already in use.

In Germany, the new system is set to launch in the coming weeks and will help customers to resolve hardware problems and set up fixed network routers, among other things.

AI replaces employees

Vodafone Germany announced in March that it would be cutting and relocating around 2,000 jobs. At the time, the company had around 15,000 employees, around a third of whom were based in the North Rhine-Westphalian capital. Accordingly, 13 percent of employees were affected by the program. In the context of the cost-cutting measures, it was also announced in March that the company would increasingly rely on AI. In addition, previously separate customer service systems for cable connections and mobile communications are to be merged.

The technology used at Vodafone is a Microsoft product, but it contains a lot of AI from OpenAI. As a major financial backer of the OpenAI start-up, Microsoft is not only allowed to use ChatGPT in its own products, but also the DALL-E image generator and the Whisper speech transcription model, which can convert spoken language into written text almost flawlessly.