Meet Mindy, Maxine, and Maikele: M1's AI Dream Team

Marko Cetkovic, chief digital officer of M1, one of Singapore's leading telco, isn’t interested in your polite chitchat about AI. “AI is not a tool, not a solution, not a product,” says M1’s chief digital officer. “It’s really a new concept that is changing the ways that we live and also the ways that we do business across all angles.”

This philosophical stance might seem surprising coming from a telecom executive. But M1 is hardly your typical telco. Since 2019, the company has undergone a radical digital transformation that’s positioned it at the bleeding edge of AI adoption in Southeast Asia. And M1, it seems, is building an AI army to lead the charge.

Decoding the human-AI relationship

Under Cetkovic’s leadership, M1 has moved 92% of its workloads to the cloud and consolidated its data into a single data lake — creating what he calls the “foundation” for AI innovation. But the real revolution isn’t in the infrastructure; it’s in how M1 is fundamentally reimagining the relationship between humans and machines.

“In the future, I don’t think the border between a human and AI will be as clear as it is right now,” Cetkovic predicts. “There will be a lot of convergence happening.”

M1 is not waiting. It has already deployed an array of AI agents across its operations, each with its own personality and name (all starting with ‘M’, naturally). There’s Mindy, a chatbot handling 100,000 unique customers monthly with a 90% success rate; Maxine, a voice bot being trained to understand Singlish; Maiestro, an eDM tool creating 300 unique marketing images monthly; and Matt, an HR bot fielding internal queries.

But perhaps most intriguing is Maikele, M1’s experimental direct sales bot. While Cetkovic is excited about its potential, he’s also refreshingly candid about the challenges. “It’s very important for the sales bot to work more on training, deal with your sales scripts, and make sure you are achieving all those different results with the sales,” which includes upselling, reselling, and maximizing sales opportunities.

This balanced approach — ambitious yet pragmatic — seems to be Cetkovic’s trademark. When asked about building internal AI capabilities versus partnering, he opts for a hybrid strategy. “I’ve seen too many times in my career that these internal products have a very good day one, but very soon they become outdated because they cannot keep pace with the market.”

Instead, M1 is leveraging partnerships with Keppel’s data centers and its subsidiary AsiaPac Technology, while also working with frontier tech vendors. The goal isn’t to reinvent the wheel but to create sustainable, economical solutions that can scale.

All CDOs know that deployment is only half the battle. Getting users to adopt it is equally hard. This is why Cetkovic sees cultural transformation as crucial for AI success.

M1’s digital office implemented six-week sprints focused on generative AI learning, involving everyone from customer service to marketing. “The AI as a technology is not a tool,” Cetkovic reiterates. “It’s really a new concept that is changing the ways that we live.”

This cultural shift extends to how employees interact with AI. M1 is already experimenting with AI copilots, with Cetkovic believing they’ll eventually move “from copilot to full autopilot.” But he’s mindful of the trust issues this raises, emphasizing the need for proper training and understanding of AI’s limitations.

The company has established what Cetkovic calls “10 commandments about AI,” aligned with parent company Keppel Group’s 10 principles. These guide everything from partner selection to contract lifecycles, ensuring AI solutions are safe, reliable, and trustworthy.

The great human mindset shift

Telcos are no strangers to disruption. Moving from product to a customer-centric model has been hard, with newer players always disrupting with new customer value propositions that exploit value gaps and churn anxiety. Now with AI, telcos need to shift their mindsets once again.

“We need to shift our mindset from people-centric to technology-centric solutions,” Cetkovic argues. But this isn’t about replacing humans. Instead, it’s about “offloading our operations from interactive, non-value-add tasks, so that we can really focus on more value-add tasks and customer-centric tasks.”

This vision of human-AI collaboration extends to M1’s approach to AI development itself. Rather than viewing AI as an analytical tool, Cetkovic advocates for what he calls a “holistic blueprint of AI” — combining both analytical and creative capabilities, internal insight, and external expression.

Perhaps most importantly, Cetkovic recognizes the need to “segregate the signal from the noise” in the AI hype cycle. At a time when vendors are claiming to solve everything with GenAI, his measured approach — focused on scalable, sustainable solutions with clear business impact — offers a refreshing counterpoint to the industry’s often breathless AI hype-building.

Reinventing the telco CDO

As telcos worldwide wrestle with digital transformation, M1’s journey offers a crucial lesson: AI success demands more than just deep pockets. It requires cultural transformation, strategic partnerships, and a clear vision of how AI can augment, not obliterate, human potential.

Looking ahead, Cetkovic envisions profound changes in how telcos operate. It will also change what it means to be a telco CDO.

Cetkovic jokes about building a “CDO bot” to replace himself in five years. But his serious vision is more nuanced. He sees the CDO role evolving into an orchestrator, managing the increasingly blurred lines between internal and external capabilities, human and AI.

“The CDO will need to make sure that all these capabilities work together in a quality, efficient but also responsible and sustainable manner,” Cetkovic concludes. In the age of AI, that might be the most valuable skill of all.

Image credit: iStockphoto/Andrey Suslov