Deutsche Telekom Targets €2.5B in AI Savings by 2030 at Investor Day

Key Points

• Deutsche Telekom raised its AI savings targets to €1.1 billion by 2027 and €2.5 billion by 2030, while identifying an additional €1 billion revenue opportunity from AI infrastructure, enterprise services and customer products.
• The company plans to deploy AI broadly across operations, including autonomous network management, customer service and software development. Targets include AI handling all initial customer calls, reducing sales-and-service costs by 20% to 30%, and automating up to 60% of software generation by 2030.
• T-Systems is positioning Deutsche Telekom as a provider of secure, sovereign AI infrastructure rather than competing directly with hyperscalers. It expects €800 million in external AI revenue by 2030 and plans to expand its Munich AI cloud capacity, subject to demand and profitability.

Deutsche Telekom ETR: DTE said it expects artificial intelligence and automation to generate €1.1 billion in gross savings by 2027, exceeding its prior €800 million target, as the telecom group expands AI applications across network operations, customer service, software development and enterprise offerings.

At its AI Investor Day in Bonn, Chief Executive Officer Tim Höttges said the company expects gross savings to reach €2.5 billion by 2030 across its European operations. Deutsche Telekom also outlined a €1 billion additional revenue opportunity tied to AI-related infrastructure, enterprise services and customer-facing products, though management emphasized that this figure was conservative and that the revenue opportunity remains less mature than its cost-savings plans.

“We want to enable AI to our customers and make their life so easy as possible,” Höttges said. “We want to stay a human-led company.”

AI targets span networks, service and software

Höttges said Deutsche Telekom has about 500 AI projects underway and is targeting automation across core operating areas. The company’s 2030 ambitions include handling 100% of customer calls initially with AI, reducing calls and chats by 50% to 55% from 2023 levels, shifting 70% of retention and tariff changes to digital channels, and improving transactional Net Promoter Score by 5%.

In network operations, the company is targeting 10% to 15% gross savings and Level 4 autonomous networks, where human intervention occurs primarily by exception. In IT and software, Deutsche Telekom expects up to 60% of software to be generated automatically with AI, while 70% to 80% of code could be written by AI tools.

Chief Financial Officer Christian Illek said the company sees roughly €10 billion of spending in technology and another €5 billion across sales, service and IT within Deutsche Telekom excluding its U.S. business. AI can address spending across these categories, he said, but the company is not changing its financial guidance because it is still investing in AI capabilities, scaling projects and absorbing related operating costs.

Illek said token costs for AI models are expected to remain in the low-double-digit percentage range of gross savings. The company plans to manage those costs through model tiering, routing tasks to lower-cost models where appropriate, vendor flexibility and internal chargebacks to business units.

Network automation and fiber efficiency

Deutsche Telekom demonstrated AI systems designed to improve network resilience and capital efficiency. In Germany, the company uses AI-enabled digital construction management for fiber rollout work, analyzing images and scans from construction sites to identify issues such as insufficient trench depth or missing infrastructure markers.

Alex Jenbar, chief technology officer for Deutsche Telekom’s German operation, said the system has delivered 100% transparency across monitored construction activity, a 15% quality improvement, 20% corrected invoices and fully automated documentation. Rodrigo Diehl, head of Germany, said AI-related fiber efficiencies of €100 million to €150 million are included in plans for next year.

The company also highlighted its RAN Guardian system, which scans public and social-media sources for events that could create mobile congestion, evaluates affected network sites and makes automated adjustments. Armin Sumesgutner, chief network officer in Europe, said the system can analyze more than 100,000 events annually, compared with about 1,000 events that could be handled manually, and has helped avoid 24 million minutes of poor customer experience.

Deutsche Telekom plans to launch its MINDR multi-agent incident-management platform as a minimum viable product in Germany by year-end. The platform is intended to correlate network alarms, identify root causes, recommend or execute remediation within guardrails, and learn from outcomes.

Customer service, enterprise and AI infrastructure

In customer operations, Dominique Leroy, board member for Europe, said the company is using AI to automate interactions, support call-center workers and tailor commercial offers. Deutsche Telekom is targeting a 20% to 30% reduction in sales-and-service costs by 2030, before token costs, along with 1% to 1.5% aggregate B2C growth attributable to AI-driven lower churn and higher upselling.

The company cited a German fiber use case in which predictive outreach reduced cancellation rates among identified at-risk customers by 50%, safeguarding 12,000 broadband customers. It also said AI tools have been deployed to help contact-center agents with customer summaries, recommended responses and automatic documentation.

For enterprise customers, T-Systems is building what Chief Executive Officer Ferri Abolhassan described as a sovereign AI stack spanning connectivity, security, compute, models and applications. The company said its Industrial AI Cloud in Munich has 10,000 GPUs and that it intends to expand capacity from roughly 12 megawatts to 20 megawatts. It is also evaluating a potential expansion to as much as 100 megawatts, subject to demand and profitability.

T-Systems expects €800 million in external AI-related revenue by 2030. Abolhassan said the business had targeted €200 million in external AI revenue by the time of the event and had reached €250 million.

Management said it would prioritize utilization and customer commitments before expanding data-center investments. Höttges said Deutsche Telekom does not intend to compete directly with hyperscalers or frontier-model developers, instead positioning itself around trusted, secure and sovereign infrastructure, customer access and enterprise distribution.

About Deutsche Telekom (ETR:DTE)

Deutsche Telekom AG, together with its subsidiaries, provides integrated telecommunication services. The company operates through Germany, United States, Europe, Systems Solutions, Group Development, and Group Headquarters and Group Services segments. It offers fixed-network services, including voice and data communication services based on fixed-network and broadband technology; and sells terminal equipment and other hardware products, as well as services to resellers. In addition, the company provides mobile voice and data services to consumers and business customers; sells mobile devices and other hardware products; and sells mobile services to resellers and to companies that purchases and markets network services to third parties, such as mobile virtual network operators.

This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to contact@marketbeat.com.