Laying a strong organizational foundation and increasing employee comfort and confidence with artificial intelligence (AI) were the highlights of a session about how broadband providers can harness AI at the NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association RTIME conference yesterday.
The session, titled “Leveraging AI Across Rural Broadband Operations,” took the form of a conversation between Calix Vice President of Global Field and Partner Marketing Teresa McGaughey and Vantage Point Solutions Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Gregory Al Aymar.
McGaughey set the stage by noting that the adoption of AI has been faster than most other technologies and that it comes with several “landmines” — including “hallucinations,” errors, and so on. Nevertheless, “AI can provide us with a lot of benefit if we put the right guardrails around it,” she said.
Aymar reassured the providers in the room that the broadband industry is not behind in AI use. “Starting small and accurately, having data integrity, putting the right things into place, and never forgetting about our people [will] put us on the right track with AI,” he said.
After their opening addresses, McGaughey asked Aymar what the primary focus for broadband providers should be with regard to AI: “What matters more, the technology or the clarity of intent?” Aymar noted AI technology is still evolving, so he suggested that intent matters far more.
“Set up an organizational culture that embraces it, with [guidelines] around where [employees are] able to utilize it — always stay within the parameters of our business and our data integrity, data security, privacy concerns, and things like that.”
Aymar said that broadband teams’ reticence about AI can be overcome through transparency about how the technology is being used.
Once a leader establishes a culture of openness to AI, Aymar said, “Sooner or later, there will be a lightbulb moment. Someone will have an opportunity to find an efficiency and take [their first] little steps. Now they’re moving forward in a confident way, as opposed to, ‘This is a grand experiment, and I don’t know what I should or shouldn’t be doing.’”
McGaughey brought up employees’ concern that they will lose their jobs, likening AI in broadband to the industrial revolution: “Before the industrial revolution, all these people had jobs. And after the industrial revolution, they all still had jobs — but those jobs looked a lot different than they did before.”
“The best thing we can do is start to train [employees],” Aymar said, “start to make people comfortable with it,” and show employees that AI makes people more valuable, not less valuable. “It has to start with baby steps — and it has to make our people and our organizations very confident — and then we can scale,” he said.
