A lot of the buzz around AI surrounds futuristic tech that even sounds a little scary. However, AI is already working invisibly behind the scenes to empower many essential applications. All the attention tends to get showered on showcase AI programs, like those winning at Jeopardy or going rogue on social media. Perhaps they attract so much attention because they seem so human. Meanwhile, functional AI is quietly minding its own business and redefining industries from the ground up.
Take a moment to go behind the scenes at how telecom companies are relying on AI today to help humans connect with each other and communicate more effectively.
AI Looks into the Future
AT&T and Verizon are leading the research into AI initiatives for self-healing networks. Pattern seeking algorithms can detect signals that normally precede breakdowns at cell towers or inside communications lines. Known as for predictive or condition-based maintenance, these intelligent agents seek to minimize customer impacts by repair networks before there is an outage.
AT&T’s VP of Advanced Technology, Mazin Gilbert, explained that their strategy includes “implementing AI to help us to identify where these breakpoints are, and help to repair those in an automated way without human intervention.”
Along the same lines, Verizon is sharing its latest advances in AI through a program called Exponent, which brings advanced tech tools to smaller carriers all over the planet.
As landlines are abandoned or replaced, cellular networks are taking on a larger role in facilitating essential business tasks. Self-healing networks could have life life-saving implications, and will probably get the job done faster than the guy that used to climb your telephone pole.
AI Answers the Call
One form of AI that virtually everyone in the US has interacted with at some point is the automated attendant. Approximately 8 out of 10 US firms say that they either already have an AI attendant or have plans to put one in place one by 2020.
In a survey from Information Solutions Group, 87% of consumers agreed working with an AI attendant is fine as long as these programs are effective and can handle simple requests. Many consumers have expressed how frustrating it can be to go through seemingly endless phone trees or speak to an attendant that can’t recognize simple words. On the other hand, the phenomenal success of Alexa and Siri testify to how willing consumers are to interact with AI that is both fun and useful.
What’s different today is that there have been significant developments in natural language processing (NLP) over the past few years, thanks to investments from companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple. The next generation of office phone systems will have smart routing and AI that’s able to learn from the behavior of callers and employees to optimize the experience for both.
AI Dives into Call Data
Even after a customer call ends, AI has a role to play. Data analysis and machine learning programs seek to derive actionable insights from the quality of the interaction and implement strategies for iterative improvements. Instead of relying on data only from caller satisfaction surveys, AI can make conclusions about satisfaction ratings based on caller voice patterns, unexpected breaks, and often unintelligible crosstalk. AI algorithms have been taught to identify key phrases and cadences that indicate delays, such as “We have to figure out how to…”
On the sales side of the business equation, a recent study of outbound calls by sales teams yielded the insight that the ideal talk-to-listen ratio is 43:57. That means that the most successful sales close rates resulted when sales team members spent an average of 43 minutes speaking for every 57 minutes that they listened to the customer. These are the kinds of insights that AI + big data can serve up even for companies who can’t afford a sophisticated analytics platform.
AI’s Role as the New Communications Backbone
The rise of functional AI in telecom was made possible by the mobile revolution and digital transformation. Since the introduction of the telephone in the 19th century, no other innovation in the field of communications has changed daily lives as much as the smartphone with its infinite app ecosystem. Smartphones have had the fastest adoption curve of any technology in history, according to MIT Technology Review. In 2017, mobile devices outnumber the total human population.
The past decade has seen great leaps in AI capabilities in step with the spread of mobility. One of the primary reasons is that the vast distributed computing power of apps in the cloud and smartphones everywhere have provided AI platforms with the crowdsourced processing boost they needed to mature into reliable business tools.
The near future suggests that telecom companies will have access to far greater processing power for more flexible AI thanks to developments like miniaturization, wearable IoT, and energy harvesting tech.
Telecom now stands on the threshold of unpredictable changes in how people connect each other, how they interact with intelligent machines and what we all can learn from the flood of data emerging from those interactions. When we think about AI, we don’t always picture how it can help people connect and solve problems, but this is arguably its most noble endeavor.
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