By Kenrick Cai

SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 - Verizon VZ.N said an AI assistant for the company's customer service representatives built using Google GOOGL.O 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.O 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.

(Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

((Kenrick.Cai@thomsonreuters.com))