In an era where customer expectations are reshaping industries, Apptium Technologies stands at the forefront of innovation. At its helm is Rick Kapani, Founder and CEO, whose visionary approach is driving transformative solutions in AI, customer engagement, and operational efficiency.
In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review during the 18th edition of the Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, Kapani delved into the essence of Apptium’s enduring brand presence, the evolution of personalized customer experiences, and how cognitive AI tools are revolutionizing CSP operations.
What is at the core of Apptium’s strong brand presence, technology, and solutions?
To give you perspective on what's at our core, today, we actively service over 150,000 companies across 86 countries, operating and transacting in 21 languages and 14 currencies. We cater to 40 major CSPs across five continents.
From our inception until today, our sense of value continues to be at our core as we deliver continuous value by evolving. As an online commerce platform that spans everything from product lifecycle management and customer lifecycle management to billing mediation, we look at what we can do to enable turnkey solutions for our customers, reducing the need for development and ongoing cost of ownership, and accelerating the time-to-revenue.
At our core, our value is simple. We ask ourselves, ‘What can we do to accelerate the value for our end customers and their consumers?’ And we identify how we can do so in a continuous, open, extensible way. To achieve this, we're developing the next best opportunity, the next best solution, the next best technology, and the next best presence or differentiator that can be used in the form of a go-to-market strategy.
From your perspective, how will customer experience management and personalized experiences evolve in the coming years?
Customer experience management and personalized experiences have already evolved quickly, at the speed of the customer, with great demand. Today's consumer—whether it be B2C, B2B, B2B2X, or a large enterprise—wants more tangible, meaningful engagement that is intuitive, responsive, and fits their needs.
From an Apptium standpoint, we're tailoring these solutions to be data-driven and cognitive in nature, providing real-time insights not only into what they're using, but intelligence in and around products and services that could better fulfill their needs and business practices and help them, whether it be in terms of cost reduction, continued operation, or transparency.
From our perspective, customers today want to know what they're buying, why they bought it, what value it delivers, how it's being used, and how they could potentially evolve it; not just to save money, but also to create greater engagement and deliver valuable insights that leave them feeling fulfilled. This sense of fulfillment and satisfaction, I foresee, will advance customer engagement, and we're meeting these needs through cognitive AI tools that form the core of our platform.
How can CSPs leverage Apptium’s AI tools for their business operations, and how are these powering data-driven recommendations?
AI is the focal point of a lot of discussions today, and data is the underpinning common denominator for AI. You can't train an AI engine without having that data. From an Apptium standpoint, we're unique because we cover everything from product onboarding to usage reading and mediation—addressing the entire customer journey. Using this knowledge, we incorporate it into a large language model (LLM) to deliver cognitive AI capabilities.
But what do I mean by cognitive AI? I’m referring to how CSPs can leverage everything from rule engines to simple business decisions to provide recommendations. Today, we're doing something that's completely unheard of. We're taking industry standards from a cyber information score, and we're ranking that cyber information score against products and services to determine how it could potentially help customers comply with their security needs. Whether it’s meeting financial operations needs, providing dashboards, or delivering reporting and analytics, we're making all this available through our platform and APIs. This provides CSPs with the ability to offer this service to their customers, ultimately delivering greater value.
This ties in with the concept and ideas associated with customer engagement evolution. Through data, AI, and large language models (LLMs), we deliver cognitive experiences that provide tangible value in a rapid fashion, accelerating time-to-market and time-to-revenue.
This is not something that is a concept or tool; this is real; it's tangible; it can be leveraged today. In my opinion, this is how CSPs can certainly leverage Apptium’s AI capabilities to deliver value to their customers, ultimately growing their revenue and monetizing their products and services to continuously evolve with their customers’ needs.
Kapani at TRS-24: The Expanding Role of Hyperscalers in the Cloud Market
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