Cobus Loots, CEO of Pan African Resources, on delivering sector-leading returns for shareholders. Watch the video here.
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Strikes never help shares but BT held up well today and Uefa until 2027 will help. People I know who have renewed with BT were given similar priced contracts to their existing ones but the new ones had inflationary price clauses built in where the price for renewal was quoted about the same but it can go up through the year based on a review date whereby inflation plus a foxed percentage increases the bill. That should help them weather the storm and meet increased wage demands to avert any strikes.
"How is AI going to help ? with nobody to take the call. It’s just a filter and buffer to eventually pass on to a real person"
You'll never be able to replace real people completely, but AI will reduce back office staff dramatically, leaving a core of technically able operators who'll have higher access to systems, technically they'd be somewhere between the current call centre basic operator, and Network operations Engineers. My guess is you could reduce call centre staffing by a significant amount, maybe 75%, over a number of years .
Anyone remember the early attempts at speech recognition? It was useless, probably 50% accurate on a good day, and that was after you'd trained the application to recognise your voice, if you had a cold forget it. Nowaday's look at speech recognition, you can ask Alexa about most things, the app will recognise the question, whoever is asking, so highly technical question like "Why does 5h1t stink" can finally be answered.
What could you do with AI? While we're still on PSTN, AI could ask questions, make line tests, raise a fault, and assign a priority dependent on SLA's, etc; It could also decide to pass customers onto dedicated teams dependant on pre-programmed criteria.
Once PSTN is switched off, and everyone's on Passive Optical Networks, faults will become more apparent as multiple customers will be affected per OLT, with the diagnostics within the Exchange OLT's raising alarms immediatly; Should the operators decide to implement it, AI could be used to monitor and filter alarms and immediately email affected users dependant on the severity of the alarms, as well as giving status/progress updates; The reason i suggested that customers might be emailed dependant on the "severity of the alarms", is that errors and intermittent faults might not fall within SLA's warranting immediate action, so customers wouldn't need updating unless Fault resolution requires extensive downtime.
After many teething problems, AI wont just reduce customer facing staff, but it'll likely reduce the number of jobs in Network Operations too; You have Network Operations Engineers monitoring Alarm screens 24 hours a day, the alarms will be assigned a priority, and the higher priority alarms will be the ones attracting the attention of the Engineers; You also have thousands of minor alarms fleeting through, that'll be ignored unless there's a customer complaint, which will then be investigated under a customer raised fault; AI could monitor every alarm, collate them automatically, and change the priority of persistant intermittent alarms, then raise a fault to be processed by the back office operators, or assigned straight out to the Field Engineers.
I repeat what i said at the beginning of this post, "You'll never be able to replace real people completely, but AI will reduce back office staff dramatically".
Just to add to my last post. Any job involving people looking at screens, taking calls, analysing data and performing remote actions, can be replaced with AI. What AI isn't currently capable of doing is thinking outside of the box, so a small percentage of faults will require a back office Technical Support team, to investigate the small, less than 5%, of faults AI wont be able to cope with. My guess is, Software Engineers are already working on various seperate projects to reduce back office staff; I'm not talking about BT specifically, but across the whole industry, fortunatly for Field Engineers, they're a lot harder to replace.
Obviously these changes wont happen overnight, it'll be an evolutionary process, but industrial action's will accelerate the changes.
“ but industrial action's will accelerate the changes”. And compulsory redundancies I think
Read some of the comments in this article, strikes are as devisive in this country as politics these days. I suspect the General public have little sympathy for strikers. The comments are more interesting than the article.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/06/cwu-vote-to-strike-over-bt-pay-as-openreach-prep-contingency-plan.html
"In a funny way you ridiculous comments have provided evidence to support my point about contractors and sub contractors doing the majority of the fibre first rollout work. Just shows how the continued denial of several BT group employees are so out of touch."
"Whats with all this contractor bashing on here? I would love to see you Openreach guys experience a year of contracting, being paid less than £25 for a mornings work doing full whack provides, new dropwire, lead in, socket, dealing with faulty D and E sides after you have nicked a pair UG feeding a spare on the DP without updating or even caring where that between joints pairs’s DP and term was. 10 Spares on CSS, all DIS UG yet showing as preconnected, then having to deal with the faulty e side and a PCP that hasnt been built correctly.
Yes you may have to fix our mess ups, but you get paid per hour, and have a good package on top of that. We get a pittance, and then you using the candid app on us all the time to get our money for the job took off us for clearing the fault in the PCP on closure, when you actually cleared it in a rotten Joint UG!
Oh, and then clear off at 16:10 when we are still working til 7 while your having dinner with family!"