Recently my elderly disabled mother experienced a lengthy outage with her land line that is serviced by Brightspeed Communications. She could not receive incoming calls nor make outgoing calls for several days, which could have been disastrous in getting life-sustaining care.
It took two separate online chat conversations for me to convince a service representative to send a technician to do on-site troubleshooting. The root cause was attributed to a nearby malfunctioning switch box. Had I not reported the issue to Brightspeed, there would have been no detection, troubleshooting, or restoration of phone service.
As an avid IT Service Management practitioner, I couldn’t help but wonder why Brightspeed hadn't implemented Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its landline operations to improve their incident response capabilities to prevent this undetected outage. AI could help in the following ways:
Predictive Incident Management: AI can be used to predict potential incidents and prevent them from occurring. By monitoring transmission data from the switch box, AI could identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate an impending incident that could trigger proactive measures for troubleshooting and response without waiting for human intervention.
Faster Incident Response: AI can help organizations respond to incidents more quickly and efficiently. By automating certain tasks from event monitoring data collection and analysis, AI can help reduce the time it takes to identify and respond to an incident. AI analysis of impacted components would automatically trigger incident records with a high priority classification with routing and notifications to those responsible for expediting a timely review and resolution. AI-generated status reports of these incidents would also be promptly communicated to support staff in real time via automated knowledge management tools. These functions can help minimize the impact of an incident and reduce downtime.
Improved Decision Making: AI can help operations support staff make better decisions during an incident. By providing real-time insights and recommendations, AI can help support teams make informed decisions and take appropriate corrective actions quickly and effectively.
Reduced Costs: By automating certain tasks, AI can help support teams reduce the costs associated with incident response. This can include reducing the time and resources required to identify and respond to an incident, as well as reducing the impact of an incident on users.
By utilizing AI in event monitoring and incident response, Brightspeed would promote an agile environment that gives support resources the ability to respond to changing conditions quickly and proactively while sustaining the following improvements:
• Increased customer satisfaction through continuous monitoring and detection of services
• Increased service availability and decreased service interruption
• Reduced unplanned labor and costs for technicians and support teams
