Telcos have rich customer signals across usage, billing, network activity, and location, but turning those signals into timely, personalized action remains difficult. Circles saw an opportunity to rethink the telco experience around that challenge, using OpenAI to build an AI-native telco stack that can connect support, personalization, operations, and monetization in real time.

The result is a customer experience built around Circles’ AI Concierge, a conversational interface powered by OpenAI’s API platform. In Singapore, Circles’ AI-powered personalization has helped increase ARPU by 22% and reduce churn by 9%. CareX, the multi-agent architecture behind the AI Concierge, now delivers a 65% autonomous resolution rate for customer support.

Founded in Singapore, Circles is a technology company whose SaaS platform helps digital telco operators launch and run AI-powered customer experiences. The company also operates Circles.Life, its own consumer telco business in Singapore. Founded in 2014, Circles works with telco operators across 14 countries and six continents.

Building the AI Concierge

Traditional telco support is often reactive. Customers navigate menus, repeat information, and wait for help after a problem has already occurred. While operators have rich customer data across usage, billing, network activity, and location, it has remained a challenge to turn those signals into timely, personalized action. To address this, Circles built its AI Concierge on the OpenAI API, creating a conversational interface designed to deliver proactive, context-aware customer engagement.

The AI Concierge brings search, account management, support, and personalized recommendations into a single experience. By understanding a customer’s real-time context, such as browsing roaming options or investigating a billing issue, it can route requests to the appropriate specialist agents, recommend relevant actions, and resolve issues without requiring customers to repeat information or navigate multiple workflows.

"AI should empower users, not force-fit them into outdated journeys. OpenAI's role has been critical in enabling Circles to scale this vision globally. With the AI concierge, we are moving beyond providing simple answers to delivering real-world outcomes, along with balancing cost and latency to maximize value for operators and customers alike."

—Awais Malik, Global Chief Growth Officer, Circles

Orchestrating support with CareX

CareX is the proprietary multi-agent architecture that powers Circles’ AI Concierge. It combines an orchestration agent that understands each customer’s history and current activity with specialist agents for billing, subscriptions, network management, and account services.

Unlike a traditional chatbot, CareX is designed to understand, act, and resolve customer requests. For example, when a customer raises a billing issue, the orchestration agent combines the customer’s app context, account history, and request before routing it to the appropriate specialist agent. The agent receives only the information needed to resolve the issue. If required, the AI agent seamlessly escalates the case to a human agent with the full context attached.

The approach is already delivering measurable results. In an early deployment, one operator achieved 55% autonomous resolution within the first week. Today, CareX autonomously resolves 65% of customer service interactions across supported workflows, without human intervention.

As CareX expands into real-time voice support, the platform is targeting 95% autonomous resolution across the entire workflow, including text and voice. This will extend the same AI-driven resolution capabilities to the channel many customers turn to first, while making service more natural, immediate, and accessible.

Personalizing customer value with Xplore IQ

Built on the OpenAI API, Xplore IQ is Circles’ AI-powered personalization engine. It combines customer behavior, account history, and real-time signals to identify the most relevant next action, from recommending a roaming pack or plan upgrade to preventing churn before it happens.

By replacing broad campaigns with hyper-personalized recommendations, Xplore IQ helps operators engage customers at the right moment. In Singapore, Circles measured its impact by comparing customers who received AI-powered recommendations against those who didn’t. The AI-powered group achieved a 22% increase in ARPU through higher plan upgrades and add-on subscriptions, while timely, relevant recommendations helped reduce churn by 9%.

Improving engineering velocity with Codex

Beyond its customer-facing AI products, Circles also uses Codex internally to improve engineering velocity across engineering, infosec, and incident management teams. Teams use Codex to accelerate design, coding assistance and testing, while keeping specialists responsible for validation and final review.

Codex has delivered a 29% increase in development efficiency by involving design, coding assistance, and unit testing, allowing engineers to spend their time focusing on higher-value product innovation.

Keeping governance central

Building AI for telcos requires safeguards for both customers and operators. Circles applies automated controls before customer information reaches the model layer, including identifying and encrypting personally identifiable information before it is passed to LLMs. Specialist agents are given scoped access to the information needed for a specific resolution task, rather than unrestricted access to a full customer profile.

Circles also uses human escalation paths, phased rollouts, rate limits, rollback mechanisms, and commercial safeguards to help maintain operational control as AI-powered experiences scale across telco environments.

What’s next

Circles is expanding its AI-native telco stack with OpenAI by enhancing CareX’s observability and introducing real-time voice support, which makes customer interactions more natural and accessible. Longer term, the company envisions a conversational, context-aware telco experience that moves beyond traditional app navigation, helping operators deliver more proactive, personalized customer engagement.