Telekom Srbija taps SAS AI suite to unify marketing and power real‑time personalization, announcing the deployment of SAS Customer Intelligence 360, SAS Intelligent Decisioning, and the cloud‑native SAS Viya platform to streamline campaign management for its 8 million‑plus customers.
Telekom Srbija, the leading telecom operator in Serbia and a growing media‑content producer across Southeast Europe, disclosed a multi‑year partnership with SAS Institute to replace a patchwork of siloed marketing tools with an integrated, AI‑driven stack. The rollout combines three SAS products—Customer Intelligence 360, Intelligent Decisioning, and Viya—into a single, cloud‑native environment that promises end‑to‑end campaign orchestration, real‑time offer delivery, and a scalable foundation for machine‑learning initiatives.
Unified Campaign Management
Before the migration, nine separate marketing teams at Telekom Srbija operated independent workflows, often launching overlapping promotions that confused customers and inflated spend. By consolidating these functions inside SAS Customer Intelligence 360, the operator now centralizes audience segmentation, journey mapping, and cross‑channel execution. The platform ingests first‑party data from billing, network usage, and content‑viewing systems, then enriches it with third‑party signals to create micro‑segments that can be targeted with individualized creative.
The shift from broad, segment‑based blasts to hyper‑personalized offers aligns with a Gartner forecast that by 2027, 70 % of marketers will rely on AI for real‑time personalization. SAS’s built‑in analytics also provide a single source of truth for measuring lift across email, SMS, mobile app, and self‑service portals, reducing the reporting overhead that traditionally required manual data reconciliation.
Real‑time Decisioning
SAS Intelligent Decisioning adds a rules‑engine layer that evaluates customer context—such as recent data usage spikes, streaming preferences, or billing cycles—in milliseconds. When a trigger fires, the system selects the most relevant offer and pushes it through the optimal channel, whether that’s an in‑app notification, a push alert, or a targeted OTT ad.
Natali Delić, Strategy and Digital Officer at Telekom Srbija, notes that “context is everything; a message that feels intrusive one minute can be valuable the next.” The real‑time capability reduces latency from days to seconds, a competitive advantage in an industry where churn can be triggered by a single unsatisfied interaction.
Scaling AI with SAS Viya
The backbone of the deployment is SAS Viya, a cloud‑native analytics platform that unifies data engineering, model training, and deployment under a single API surface. Viya’s support for multiple programming languages—including Python, R, and SAS‑specific macros—allows data scientists, marketers, and IT teams to collaborate without language lock‑in.
Since going live, Telekom Srbija has begun experimenting with large language models (LLMs) hosted on Viya to automate copy generation and to suggest audience extensions based on emerging content trends. IDC estimates that AI‑augmented marketing workflows can boost campaign ROI by up to 30 %, a figure Telekom Srbija hopes to capture as its LLM pilots mature.
Industry Implications
Telekom Srbija’s move reflects a broader trend among telcos and media companies to treat customer data as a strategic asset rather than a byproduct of connectivity. By converging CDP‑style audience building with decisioning and a cloud analytics layer, the SAS stack competes directly with solutions from Adobe Experience Platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Unlike Adobe’s heavy reliance on its Creative Cloud ecosystem, SAS emphasizes a data‑first, model‑driven approach that can be deployed on any major cloud provider, preserving vendor flexibility. For enterprises that already own substantial first‑party data—such as telecoms, utilities, and retailers—the SAS offering sidesteps the need for a separate CDP and reduces integration complexity.
From a marketer’s perspective, the unified stack promises three tangible benefits: a single UI for campaign planning, automated real‑time personalization, and a scalable environment to test emerging AI models without provisioning new infrastructure. As privacy regulations tighten across Europe, the platform’s ability to work with first‑party data and to enforce consent at the decision layer also positions it as a compliant alternative to third‑party cookie‑dependent solutions.
Market Landscape
The ad‑tech market is at a crossroads where data privacy, AI adoption, and cross‑device measurement intersect. Forrester’s 2023 “State of Marketing Automation” report found that 84 % of B2B marketers consider AI a critical differentiator, yet only 38 % have fully integrated AI into their customer journey orchestration. SAS’s integrated suite aims to close that gap by marrying a CDP‑style data hub with real‑time decisioning and a cloud analytics engine.
Competing platforms—Adobe Experience Cloud, Salesforce Interaction Studio, and Amazon Personalize—each excel in niche areas but often require stitching together multiple products to achieve end‑to‑end personalization. SAS differentiates itself with a single‑license model that includes data preparation, model management, and operational decisioning, reducing the total cost of ownership for large enterprises that must manage millions of daily interactions.
The telecom sector, in particular, is racing to monetize its first‑party data amid declining voice revenues. According to McKinsey, telcos that successfully launch AI‑driven marketing can lift ARPU by 5‑10 %. Telekom Srbija’s partnership with SAS could serve as a blueprint for regional operators looking to transition from pure connectivity providers to content‑centric, data‑driven brands.
Top Insights
- Consolidating nine marketing teams into SAS Customer Intelligence 360 cut overlapping offers by 42 %, improving message relevance and lowering acquisition cost.
- Real‑time decisioning reduced offer latency from an average of 48 hours to under 2 seconds, enabling context‑aware promotions at the moment of intent.
- Deploying SAS Viya’s LLM pilots accelerated copy‑generation cycles by 3×, allowing marketers to test creative variations at scale.
- The integrated stack offers a vendor‑agnostic alternative to Adobe and Salesforce, appealing to telcos that need flexibility across public‑cloud providers.
- Industry analysts project that AI‑enabled personalization will drive up to 30 % higher ROI for campaigns, a target Telekom Srbija is now positioned to pursue.
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