SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 - Verizon said an AI

assistant for the company's customer service representatives

built using Google models had cut down on call times

and freed them up to sell products to customers, leading to a

surge in sales.

An AI assistant on their screen helps the customer service

agents figure out the right answers to customers' queries.

Verizon first started deploying the new AI features in July

2024, ramping them up to full scale in January. Sales through

its 28,000-person service team are up nearly 40% since their

deployment, according to Sampath Sowmyanarayan, CEO of Verizon's

consumer group.

"We are doing reskilling in real time from customer care

agents to selling agents," he said.

The AI-driven shift at Verizon, announced during Google

Cloud's annual conference, may serve as a counterpoint to

concerns from some public market investors that tech giants are

spending too much on AI without big payoffs.

Many prospective enterprise customers are still deliberating

whether and how to expand adoption of buzzy generative AI

technologies from trial runs to wide-scale deployment.

"Compared to what other people are doing, this is enormous

scale," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters.

Kurian's unit is a key driver of growth for Alphabet,

accounting for $43 billion of its $350 billion revenue in 2024.

Verizon's new internal software was created by feeding

nearly 15,000 internal documents into a version of Google's

flagship Gemini large language model, Sowmyanarayan said.

Its efforts contrast with some companies, like Swedish

payments group Klarna, which have opted to use AI to replace

customer service staffers. Sowmyanarayan said there are "much

easier ways" to reduce costs.

Verizon primarily partners with two cloud providers: Amazon ( AMZN )

for application deployment and computing

infrastructure, and Google Cloud for analytics and AI. It picked

Google over competitors because of its ability to deploy the AI

offerings to tens of thousands of people, Sowmyanarayan said.