Telcos Were Australia's Worst for Wait Times. Now They're the Fastest. AI Did It.

ServiceNow's March 2026 research produced a striking finding: the telecommunications sector, previously ranked worst in Australia for customer wait times, is now the fastest industry to resolve issues. Telecom companies now take an average of 2.4 days to resolve matters, with 41% of cases closed in under an hour. ServiceNow's Pete Andrew credits this directly to sustained investment in AI and workflow automation by players including Telstra.

The turnaround was not overnight. Telcos invested in AI for billing queries, outage notifications, and account management - high-volume, repeatable request types where automation delivers measurable speed gains. By removing these queries from human queues, wait times for complex issues also fell. The sector is now a template that banks, healthcare providers, and government agencies are watching closely.