AI World 2019: 5G, Automation, and Field Service

Boston, Massachusetts – Another exciting week at Zinier, after an action-packed week in Boston at the AI World Conference and Expo.

AI World is the largest business-focused AI conference in the United States. Organized by the Cambridge Innovation Institute, it examines AI in the enterprise.

Over the three-day event, our team demonstrated how AI-driven automation can help field service organizations work smarter and faster with AI. By analyzing real-time data against historical trends, field service leaders can leverage predictive insights to optimize their operations.

On Friday, our CEO, Arka Dhar, participated in a panel on the state of AI in telecom and wireless. Also taking part were Manish Mangal, Chief Technology Officer, Network Services at Tech Mahindra, Nancy Ranxing Li, PhD, Group Product Manager, Edge Computing at Verizon, and Phil Marshall, Chief Research Officer at Tolaga Research.

Together, the panelists discussed some of the most pressing issues in field service, including the need to streamline processes ahead of 5G deployments. All three major U.S. mobile operators plan to roll out 5G networks by 2020, and each one says that AI will be instrumental in this effort.

During the panel, Arka addressed the importance of automation in driving productivity.

“There are many legacy challenges we have to tackle, and to truly drive change organizations need to enable automation for their field teams,” he said.

One area touched on was the challenge of multi-layer contracting in field service. There are hundreds of thousands of trucks in the field, contracted and dispatched by hundreds of firms. Tracking that many moving pieces – and avoiding breakdowns – is difficult. Doing it at scale is almost impossible, without the help of automation.

AI helps organizations eliminate unplanned downtime by looking at real-time data and historical trends to determine when failure is likely. This approach helps teams resolve minor issues before they snowball into larger problems. When it comes to 5G, AI-driven automation will help field service organizations install and maintain a rapidly increasing number of job sites.

According to panelist Manish Mangal, organizations can no longer rely on the manual interventions of people – field service has to be automated.

“If we were having this conversation a year from now, no one would be asking ‘Can we use AI?’” he said. “They would be saying ‘We can’t operate without it.’”

AI World provided an exciting glimpse into the explosive growth of AI across industries, and we’re proud to be part of that future. As companies continue to evaluate the impact of AI on their operations, our AI-driven field service automation platform is helping power the next generation of field service.