Revolutionizing Voice Assistants through Cutting-Edge Artificial Intelligence Strategies

Venkata Raj Kiran Kollimarla, a senior data scientist at TMobile Inc., is a strong contender for the "Artificial Intelligence" award for his innovative work. Raj played a crucial role in developing a natural language processing system and supporting infrastructure that significantly improved the quality and efficacy of customer care at T-Mobile, one of the largest mobile carriers in the United States with over 120 million subscribers.


Raj's contributions were multifaceted and transformative, showcasing his expertise in artificial intelligence and his ability to drive meaningful change within the organization. His key achievements include:


Designing and implementing a novel end to end artificial intelligence and information retrieval system that combined unsupervised machine learning and hierarchical Bayesian statistics.
Growing the team from 2 to 6 data scientists, creating a rigorous interview process, and providing ongoing mentorship.
Creating a measurement framework grounded in advanced statistical principles to monitor and improve the system's performance.
Architecting an optimal computational infrastructure to support high availability.
Acting as a subject matter expert for the product and customer care teams to guide various customer facing and backend design decisions.
The product improved the conversion rate of prospective customers while reducing existing customer churn, leading to net customer additions of 1.8 million in Q4 2021 and 5.8 million for the full year 2021, the highest annual number in five years. The system also improved overall customer care wait time by more than 12% and up to 35% for complex topics, reduced the average time spent per support case by 15%, and increased the selfserve resolution rate by 7%.


Raj's innovations have not only helped T-Mobile achieve record levels of quality and productivity in customer service but have also redefined industry standards. His work has demonstrated the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in enhancing customer experience, optimizing operational efficiency, and driving business growth. As a contender for the "Artificial Intelligence" award, Raj's contributions exemplify the power of AI in revolutionizing the telecommunications sector and setting new benchmarks for excellence in customer care.