Cover story
Cover story
Intelligent testing
What role will AI play in T & M ? Does GenAI have a role , such as in tech support ? Aprecomm : It has a huge role to play . GenAI is already transforming customer support by enhancing efficiency and providing personalisation and scalability for consumers . AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can handle routine inquiries , responding immediately to common questions and issues , reducing wait times and freeing human agents to focus on more complex cases . But it ’ s not all about helping with support interactions ; it ’ s ensuring that problems don ’ t happen in the first place , or if they do , they ’ re resolved without the customer knowing . AI and machine learning help to identify and heal common connectivity issues in real time . The evidence shows that our service provider customer , Excitel , has achieved significant results after deploying our AI-powered CX management platform , which includes tools to identify and fix problems , reducing support call duration by 30 % and a 35 % improvement in first call resolution . Excitel reduced their overall support staff by 15 %. Bridge Technologies : We need to be on the mark in the broadcast industry – and indeed in the technology field in general – with the way we use the term AI . It has become the buzzword of the decade , and
10 EUROMEDIA
Test & Monitor is essential to consumer QoE and shielding the provider from avoidable Opex and Capex . What is the role of AI ? Will we see a new era of ‘ self-diagnosis ’ and ‘ self-healing ’? Euromedia sought the views of a range of sector players
with good reason , but its usage has become over-extended to the point that even washing machines are claimed to use it . There is a big difference between algorithms , machine learning and AI ( both ‘ hard ’ and ‘ soft ’). We need to be precise with our terminology if we ’ re going to discuss not only the technological elements , but also the wider social ramifications .
Our monitoring technologies have been using machine learning for a long time – it
“ GenAI is already transforming customer support .” – Aprecomm contributes to multiple processes ; establishing baselines and detecting anomalies , predictive analysis based on historical data , adaptive monitoring to optimise resource allocation , content analysis beyond simple technical metrics , and trend identification / visualisation .
But at Bridge we see these as tools that augment the work of professional engineers , not replace them . ‘ AI ’ ( howsoever defined ) can streamline activities , speed up detection and reaction , and indeed ‘ self-diagnose ’ and ‘ selfheal ’ to an extent , but only with the purpose of freeing up engineers to focus their attention on innovation and more progressive applications . Companies need to be cautious about rushing into ‘ AI ’ solutions and discarding their most valuable resource – human ingenuity – in the process .
That ’ s not to completely dismiss the role of AI , and linguistic GenAI specifically . Our core focus at Bridge has been on making information usable . Thus far , visualisations , graphs and clear readouts have been the most effective way of doing that – because it ’ s the ‘ language ’ that engineers speak . But if users indicate in the future that they value outputs in the form of dialogue or text , GenAI might have a role in creating languagebased interfaces that can be interrogated in a question and answer fashion to aid