Original article Total Telecom:Read More
Interview
The telecommunications industry has long been characterised by cyclical waves of technological innovation that promise disruption but ultimately deliver limited commercial change. For decades, operators have faced a familiar set of challenges, including declining margins, rising operational complexity, and limited differentiation.
This stagnation, says Calix CEO Michael Weening, has been evidenced in the little impact from each new generation of wireless technology.
“The industry seems to be speaking about the same things for 30 years,” he said in an interview with Total Telecom. “Every time we go from 3G to 4G or 4G to 5G, the industry says this is going to be that holy moment that changes everything. And it changes absolutely nothing. We’re soon whinging back to the same problems.”
With the advent of agentic AI, however, this could all be about to change, allowing for not only greater network efficiency but a totally new approach to delivering personalised services to customers.
“I think we’re at a pivotal moment […] Everything’s coming to a head and there’s a real opportunity to change,” said Weening. “AI completely changes how you understand the subscriber and the experiences that you can deliver to them.”
“That whole idea of these agents and how you build them into workflows will be a profound shift,” he added.
A hyper-personalised service model
It is well known that operators are some of the most customer data-rich organisations in the world, but making use of that data remains a significant challenge. Despite a wealth of data, the complexity of telco operations has typically seen providers defaulting to simplistic offerings based on price and speed. Customers are understood in a generalised way, with mass campaigns targeting demographics and geographies rather than individuals.
Now, however, the development of specialised AI agents, which can automate decision-making across multiple workflows, is making personalisation possible at an individual level and at scale. Rather than broad, undifferentiated campaigns, operators can target individuals based on real-time context, behaviour, and inferred needs.
Weening calls this the journey towards an ‘the experience of one’.
“Most communications service providers can take some demographic data and some external data about customers that will show that they, for example, own a pool. They could use that data to run a targeted marketing campaign offering an outdoor Wi-Fi package,” Weening explained. “The problem is that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, right? The customer might be a grandparent who only uses the pool when their grandchildren come over.”
With sophisticated AI agents built into each part of a providers’ workflow, customer understanding can be far more granular.
“Let’s say you work from home. The network agent can notice that your service regularly degrades at a certain time of day – perhaps when your kids come home – and it can tell you change locations. It knows you recently purchased a pergola, so it can infer you regularly move into the backyard to continue working,” Weening said. “It can then pass this information to a marketing agent, which will build a personalised plan including improved outdoor connectivity. Then, an advertising agent that knows your social media preferences will set up a targeted ad that you will see on Instagram – and if you don’t click through, it can hand off all this specific data to a call centre agent and set up a call automatically.”
A shift towards these experience-based offerings presents a major opportunity for revenue generation, with Weening noting cases of growth “as high as 25%.”
“The best thing is that these revenue gains are wildly sticky,” he said. “Once you deliver this improved experience to the customer, it becomes difficult for other providers to compete. We’ve seen NPS (Net Promoter Scores) of 94 – that’s insane!”
Building a many-layered platform
Of course, orchestrating this AI agent ecosystem is no easy task—and, according to Weening, it requires a platform model to succeed.
The architecture necessary for this transformation, Weening explained, is fundamentally built on five layers:
- The data layer, which forms the foundation.
- The knowledge and context layer, which combines Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Large Language Models (LLMs), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to build context from the data.
- The orchestration layer, which ensures the various AI agents work together accurately and efficiency.
- The trust layer, which ensures every AI agent has appropriate guardrails and can only access specific data.
- The security layer, ensuring that all this activity keeps consumer data safe.
Calix has been working on the “AI-native third generation” of its platform for the past two-and-a-half years and went live with it in February 2026. As of March 2026, all the company’s 1,200+ customers globally have been migrated to this latest version of the Calix One platform.
“What we’ve built is something that abstracts value from context,” he explained. “This level of personalisation is something we’ve always aspired to. With AI, we can finally do it at scale.”
AI needs culture change
With AI’s technical capabilities no longer in doubt, remaining barriers to adoption are largely cultural and organisational. Operators are often seen as labyrinthine and bureaucratic, strangled by legacy technology and an inability to move quickly. For Weening, only those organisations that do away with these dated stereotypes and embrace change will see success.
“People are already looking at AI like it is magic fairy dust – something you can just plug in and see results. It’s not. It’s a cultural and business transformation,” he argued. “Leadership must embrace it and use it to empower employees.”
Agentic AI may finally provide telecoms operators with a credible path to differentiation, but realising this opportunity will depend less on the technology itself and more on operators’ ability to execute the necessary organisational and cultural transformation at scale.
Learn more about the AI-native Calix One platform: https://www.calix.com/products/platform.html
Michael Weening – President and CEO of Calix Inc.
Michael has served as president and CEO of Calix since September 2022, bringing more than 20 years of experience leading growth, strategy, and transformation. Previously he served as Calix President and Chief Operating Officer. Michael joined Calix from Salesforce where he served as the senior vice president of Global Customer Success and senior vice president, Japan and Asia-Pacific Customer Success, Services and Alliances.
Over the span of his career, Michael has held executive positions in North America, Europe and Asia. Previously, Michael held leadership roles at Bell Mobility in Canada, where he was vice president of business and consumer sales. Michael also held sales leadership roles at Microsoft, in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Michael holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration, from Brock University supported by ongoing executive education at Queens, Wharton, and USC.
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