Amdocs (NASDAQ:DOX) is positioning artificial intelligence as a central component of its long-term strategy, with a focus on agentic software for telecommunications providers, expansion into adjacent markets and internal operational transformation, Group President of Technology and Head of Strategy Anthony Goonetilleke said during an Oppenheimer discussion.
Goonetilleke said the company has been realigning its vision and strategy following the transition to a new CEO, identified in the discussion as Shimie. The effort is focused on the next one, three and five years rather than near-term quarterly objectives, he said.
Three strategic pillars
Goonetilleke described Amdocs’ strategy as three main pillars supported by an internal transformation effort.
- Agentic transformation for telecommunications: Amdocs plans to continue investing in its business support systems and operations support systems, or BSS and OSS, while developing a next-generation agentic platform. Goonetilleke said the company sees a future in which software can increasingly “auto-heal,” evolve and manage changes with less manual IT intervention.
- Expansion into another complex vertical: The company believes its experience building mission-critical, always-on software for a heavily regulated industry can be applied to another sector with similar requirements. Goonetilleke did not identify the potential vertical.
- Adjacent opportunities in emerging technology markets: Amdocs is evaluating opportunities related to edge computing, workload management, security, virtualization and monetization. The company has been discussing edge mesh-grid concepts with NVIDIA, he said.
On the edge opportunity, Goonetilleke said telecom providers possess distributed sites that are powered, air-conditioned and connected by fiber. These locations could potentially support compute capacity closer to enterprises and consumers, but would require software to manage workloads, security, partitions, virtualization and commercial models.
He said Amdocs does not intend to broadly enter unrelated sectors, but is evaluating adjacent applications for technologies it has already developed. For example, the company has been working on post-quantum cryptography compliance for its enterprise applications and sees potential relevance beyond its own operations.
Internal AI adoption and token-cost controls
The company is also pursuing what Goonetilleke called an internal “customer zero” approach to becoming more agentic. He said Amdocs is a major user of Cursor and is deploying AI tools across functions including development, marketing, legal and human resources.
However, he emphasized that AI adoption introduces a new cost-management challenge: organizations must evaluate labor costs alongside the cost of tokens consumed by AI models. Amdocs has developed dashboards to monitor employee AI usage and is using model-routing tools designed to direct tasks to lower-cost models when appropriate, he said.
Goonetilleke said the company has not encountered a shortage of graphics processing units needed for its own operations. Amdocs has relationships with NVIDIA and is considering a more hybrid approach spanning frontier models, on-premises resources and GPU reuse, he said.
While AI can improve productivity, Goonetilleke said Amdocs must maintain human oversight and code-quality controls because its software supports mission-critical customer environments. He said the company views AI not only as a potential source of margin improvement, but also as a way to deliver more capabilities and expand its addressable market.
Telco AI platform opportunity
Goonetilleke said Amdocs is developing both agentic capabilities for its BSS and OSS stack and a broader AI “harness” for governance, model selection, security and cost management. He said such components could potentially be white-labeled by telecom providers and offered to enterprise customers.
Enterprises face similar issues involving model routing, security, governance and observability, he said. Telecom providers could bundle AI services with connectivity offerings, potentially including token allowances, access to frontier or hosted models, and personal AI agents.
Goonetilleke argued that the larger opportunity for telecom providers extends beyond selling GPUs as a service. While GPU capacity could become a cost-plus or commodity-like offering over time, he said higher-value opportunities could include inference services and software platforms built above the infrastructure layer.
He said telecom providers may be well positioned to address small and mid-sized businesses because connectivity is among the first services businesses procure when launching operations. Still, he said telecom executives will need to move beyond traditional connectivity offerings and take a more ambitious approach to AI services.
Early customer-care results
Goonetilleke cited an unnamed European customer that deployed an agentic system on its WhatsApp customer-service channel. Under the prior standard chatbot, roughly 30% to 40% of interactions were handled without escalation, while 60% to 70% of customers sought human assistance, he said.
With the newer agentic approach, 97% of inbound interactions on the channel were handled without human intervention or escalation, according to Goonetilleke. Only 3% required a live person, he said.
He also cited an unnamed network-related customer project that reduced annual operating costs in a particular area by 60%. More broadly, he said existing telecom providers will need to redesign workflows across customer care, service operations and network functions rather than simply add isolated AI features to legacy systems.
Goonetilleke said Amdocs continues to view major cloud providers as partners rather than direct competitors, citing its work with AWS and NVIDIA. He said the principal competitive alternative is often customers attempting to build capabilities internally, although some have later sought Amdocs’ help to accelerate their efforts.
About Amdocs (NASDAQ:DOX)
Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX) is a global software and services provider specializing in solutions for communications, media and entertainment companies. The company designs, develops and integrates revenue management, customer experience and digital services platforms that enable service providers to launch and monetize new offerings, streamline operations and enhance subscriber engagement. Amdocs’ product suite encompasses billing and order management, customer relationship management, digital commerce and network function virtualization, supported by professional services for implementation, integration and managed operations.
Founded in 1982 and structured as a separate public company in 1998, Amdocs has its corporate headquarters in Chesterfield, Missouri, and maintains major development centers in Ra’anana, Israel.
