Ben Richardson, CEO at SulNOx, confident they can cost-effectively decarbonise commercial shipping. Watch the video here.
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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!"
“ but industrial action's will accelerate the changes”. And compulsory redundancies I think
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.
"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".
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.
This will be a good test for bt to see exactly what staff they need and how many they can do without
*picks out
NDNIC00,
hi, yes ..safe for now ... but ...AI is developing at a rapid rate .... in 3-5 years it will be a different ball game I suspect ...in fact BT are crying out for AI developers and want the Government to create more training courses
I saw they have cameras now with AI inside that can film a sports event. The AI can track the players etc with no camera operator, no director, no Outside Broadcast Van...and they then send the images directly to the Cloud for editing....the AI automatically pics out the best bits
“ those call centres better watch out...Artificial Intelligence is gonna replace you, the more expensive and fussy you get ... AI doesn't get flu or COVID either ! “
There was a program on TV last night, 5 I think, AI is not all it seems to be, it’s easy to confuse so it puts you through to a REAL person quicker. AI is used on online chat and phone to assist in call directing and in the end sends around 90% of contact to a real person to resolve the issue.
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…
Larry,
My BT package is thus- broadband, landline with calls package, and two mobiles 30GB each. £81
plusnet only difference is 25GB / per mobile. Quoted 18 months at £33 rising to £53 at end of contract.
"So bad payrise across the board. Bonuses were sub-par and no share plans this year, yet PJ gets over 3mil? Thats fair right, no wonder morale is an all time low."
Not sure what part of BT you work in, unless Global, but the BT scorecard for bonus was 100%. Most people I know got their OTB (some more, and some less based on their personal performance).
So given the current climate, and the fact that not all employers are giving payrises (my wife hasn't had one) - the 4% (for a career level E) and 10% OTB is not to be sniffed at.
Would I like a 10% inflation matching payrise - hell yeah, but we need to be realistic.
those call centres better watch out...Artificial Intelligence is gonna replace you, the more expensive and fussy you get ... AI doesn't get flu or COVID either !
As a BT employee "manager/professional" grade myself, I don't need the same % increase as the Team Members. Also don't forget that the manager/professional grade typically get a 10% OTB as well on top.
You mean. other than the fact PJ banked over 3mil in bonuses and shares, of which none of the non executive levels got this year (yourshare). So bad payrise across the board. Bonuses were sub-par and no share plans this year, yet PJ gets over 3mil? Thats fair right, no wonder morale is an all time low.
'5% of £22k is less than 3% of £45k'
If you have team members that are on 22k then surely it would be the set £1500 they were getting, so they would be getting 6.8% unless they were also classed as managers. There are a lot of people within BT that aren't managers but are classed as managers and aren't on great wages but are then screwed over by the us and them approach being used by BT.
"Just shows though doesn't it. How useless Prospect are, mangers got awarded 2.5-3% pay rise and were told to accept it or get nothing, Prospect didn't bat an eyelid or fight.
OR and call centres team member grades get offered 5% which I agree is not enough, but at least they have the power to do something about it. No wonder so many are leaving Prospect, all talk but do F all"
5% of £22k is less than 3% of £45k.
As a BT employee "manager/professional" grade myself, I don't need the same % increase as the Team Members. Also don't forget that the manager/professional grade typically get a 10% OTB as well on top.
Bertie, I have Halo, BT Sport and Sky all for less than £81, granted I have to give all the 18 month call to maintain best price, so not sure how the £81 monthly price stacks up, especially against Plusnet where you say it’s priced at £33 and on the website costs £24.99 for unlimited fibre extra, the priciest service of the 3 services.
"Plusnet £33 for 18 months, £53 there after. Sure beats the hell out of BT at £81 for same service."
You do realise that BT own Plusnet...
I have to agree about Prospect the last I saw from them was 28th April
Yup, absolute waste of time, and they wonder why no one really wants to join. They just roll over, year after year. Not enough power, even if they balloted, they have like 300 members from BT, and whats going to happen if 300 managers go on strike for 1-2 days? My guess, nothing major.
lol guess who owns Plusnet
the reason I have stayed with BT is because they have opened/ returned call centres to the UK. The very centres now voting to strike.
P03C, And that is why OFCOM are trying to separate BT and Openreach.
Plusnet £33 for 18 months, £53 there after. Sure beats the hell out of BT at £81 for same service.
Berty you forget that all other isp s apart from virgin are BT customers. Even virgin use BT for parts of their network so no matter who you move to you will still be a BT customer directly or indirectly.
I have to agree about Prospect the last I saw from them was 28th April
“BT has said individual awards are ‘discretionary’ so not all members are guaranteed a pay rise. With the award worth 3-4% at a time that CPI inflation is 7% and due to rise, we cannot recommend this pay award to our members in BT.”
Then silence, as has been mentioned this is after a 2 year pay freeze for any engineer classed as a Manager (internal IT Staff)
The unions really do need to keep an eye on customer numbers. I for one will now re-asses my broadband and mobile package with BT. I refuse point blank to fund unions and their greed through higher charges.. The whole country is suffering not just BT employees. There are now cheaper suppliers of broadband and mobile services. No customers , no job.
@NigeCo, even if inflation drops to 2% then employees will still need another 2% next year on top of the 11% they need this year to maintain their standard of living. Unless inflation goes negative I don't think BT employees will need to worry about being asked to take a pay cut.