Optus says an “ecosystem” of AI and related technologies has driven operational improvements in its managed services business including a “60-to-75 percent” reduction in mean time to repair once an incident is detected.
Enterprise and business client services and delivery vice president Danny Price told a ServiceNow World Forum event that the “ecosystem” comprises “AIOps, cognitive learning, machine-based learning and now … GenAI” technologies.”
“We created a bit of an ecosystem using some third-party software, but it’s all integrated back into ServiceNow, ensuring the [enterprise and business] customer gets to see that single service experience,” Price said.
Price said that incident response is one operational area that has benefited from Optus’ use of AI and related technology, cutting mean time to repair by up to 75 percent.
Once upon a time, Optus was relatively selective in what data points it monitored so as not to “overwhelm the team”.
However, Price said the telco now “lets all the [managed] devices throw everything at us – so all the MIBs [management information bases] sitting out there are just throwing all the content to the AI toolsets, to the AIOps/machine learning/cognitive learning and now GenAI ecosystem.”
The ecosystem is designed to do two things, Price noted.
First, it is capable of level one triage of an incident “in minutes, as opposed to 20-30-45 minutes if we were lucky” previously, Price said.
“Reactively it’ll say, ‘I’ve seen this happen before’, it’ll open up a ticket in ServiceNow, give a summary of what’s taken place, and then it’ll give you a recommendation.
“It’ll say, ‘We’ve seen this before in 78 different cases across 15 different customers. If you do these three things, we believe you’ll get it up and operational.”
But, just as important for Optus, if not more, the “ecosystem” is monitoring for early indicators of incident and outage patterns.
“It’ll say, ‘I’ve seen this pattern before on a particular incident. It’ll open up a ticket, [predicting] that in two weeks’ time, we’re going to get a memory leak on a particular cloud platform, causing an incident,” Price said.
“We’ll then make sure we correct that particular circumstance before it actually becomes a customer-impacting incident.
“Once again, the number of customer-impacted minutes just gets zapped out of the business. [We’ve seen] around 30 percent [reductions] year-on-year … for the last three years.”
Now Assist trial
Optus has also emerged as a pilot user of Now Assist, a collection of generative AI tools that can augment a ServiceNow instance.
Service design and transformation director in the enterprise and business unit Naomi Beale said the telco is exploring use cases around enhancing customer experience, employee experience and efficiency.
“For customer experience, we’re looking at using ServiceNow GenAI to really hone in our customer communications, so when we’re talking to a customer, how do we have a clear, on-brand, consistent tone; how do we make sure that things are laid out in the right structure and that we’re really capturing the right information and being consistent when we communicate,” Beale said.
In employee experience, the telco has honed in on use cases around agent handover and case summarisation.
“Case summarisation is about making sure that we summarise everything when an agent supports a customer – so it’s capturing the right information in a clear, concise format,” Beale said.
“Agent handover effectively does the same thing, but it allows that to be handed over to the next person so they’ve got that proper level of detail”, she said, noting this might occur if a case is escalated for resolution.
The efficiency test cases, meanwhile, seek to power a “next best action” type capability. This could prompt a customer to change a device configuration to improve performance or to have a conversation with their account manager if they have “a lot of stuff coming out of contract”.
“There’s a whole bunch of things we’re looking to trigger through ‘next best action’ to save our people having to trawl through everything in our system and help populate that through to them in a faster way,” Beale said.
Ry Crozier travelled to ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024 as a guest of ServiceNow.