Team Partners Telecommunications

Truth is that we used to laugh when AI was mentioned at school, ‘Ho ho ho’, we sniggered, Artificial Insemination, “how funny is that!” and that was because AI stood for nothing else and anything even vaguely resembling sex was a subject to be laughed at.

But it does now. And the funny thing is that for most of us AI, in its more modern expression, doesn’t mean an awful lot more now to us than AI did to us as school kids. Seriously, how is AI affecting your day-to-day life at the moment?

And the answer is, probably more than you think! AI, artificial intelligence, is, not so slowly, becoming a vital and every day part of our lives, and our own field of telecoms is in many respects being a trailblazer in its usage. Think for a moment about the virtual assistants we all come across when looking for help, and for the chatbots, as they’re called, that hover around the edge of an increasing number of websites, just waiting for you to talk to them. No, those aren’t real people employed to respond to anyone who just happens to engage with them, even though they call themselves Mandy, or whatever, they’re a piece of AI. And they work! Apparently Vodaphone saw a huge increase in customer satisfaction when they introduced the world to TOBi, their chatbot pal.

They’re clever, these chatbots, they’ll analyse the requests they receive and learn how to respond to some, reroute others and to identify sales opportunities. They’ll even tell you about other products you may be interested in and all without any human interference...clever little chapbot.

Allow us to introduce you to another term: Machine learning. Machine learning is a way of analysing data that automates the subsequent use of that analysis so that it builds on what it has “learned” through that analysis. In other words, it’s a system automatically increasing in capability from data it has received, allowing it to make decisions without any human intervention. Which is very clever. And a bit scary.

If the ability to offer speech and voice services such as chatbots is the customer facing end of the AI revolution, what happens behind the scenes?  One important area is in predictive maintenance, where both AI and machine learning is being used to improve customer satisfaction. Insight learned, automatically, from system users are helping companies to monitor equipment, learn from experience and anticipate potential problems. Then they mend it before it happens. Which is clever and, yes, maybe a bit scary.

There’s also network optimisation. What’s called a Self Organising Network (SON) can use AI to adapt, change and reconfigure networks based on the on-going needs of that network; what’s more a SON can actually help in the design of new networks, ultimately proving themselves to be more consistent than mere humans in providing a consistent service, a fact not missed by major companies who are increasingly recognising the benefits of, another term for you, Robotic Process Automation, which, in a nutshell, is the removal of all the process mistakes injected by the human touch.

There’s more. AI can spot unusual activity and therefore help in the combat of fraud in a way that is much faster and more specifically accurate than any human...who knows AI might be writing blogs next...