Abstract

As customer expectations rise and legacy automation reaches its limits, Comcast is redefining digital care through an agentic AI transformation. This talk chronicles our evolution from scripted bots to modular, autonomous systems of intelligent agents—each capable of collaboration, context-awareness, and empathy. We’ll share our key learnings from real-world experiments in the last few years and present our vision of scaling trustworthy AI for the next era of customer care.

Fehran Ture Bio

As a Fellow at Comcast, Ferhan Ture focuses on how AI can be applied to improve product experiences as well as internal processes. His technical specialization is around natural language processing (NLP) and AI agents. Ferhan is part of the AI Technologies group, which is collectively responsible for building the backend systems, core algorithms and machine learning models that power various Comcast-affiliated products and services. This includes customer-facing products, like X1 and the Xfinity Assistant. Before joining Comcast in 2015, Ferhan graduated from the PhD program of the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland in 2013, where he defended his thesis on Machine Translation (MT) and Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). He is originally from Turkiye but has called Washington DC home for almost 20 years.

Sima Taheri Bio

Sima Taheri is a Senior Research Manager at Comcast’s AI Technologies org. She contributes to the cross-functional effort to re-architect Xfinity Assistant with GenAI and multi-agent techniques, leading several initiatives that improve customer experience end-to-end. She collaborates with colleagues, including Ferhan Ture, on the research and evaluation track, building rubric-based judging, observability, and impact metrics that guide product decisions. Sima earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, under the supervision of Professor Rama Chellappa. Before the rise of LLMs, she spent years in computer vision across multiple companies, tackling real-world perception and multimedia analytics problems. As LLMs matured, she expanded into NLP and conversational AI, applying that vision mindset to productionizing chatbot systems at scale. She lives in Virginia with her husband and their two kids.