Nokia is adding AI to its network management capabilities to help engineers maintain quality of service in complex networks. Deepak Harie, SVP, Head of Technical Support Services at Nokia said the aim was to help customers respond to network issues faster, making it easier for network engineers to spot problems and resolve them faster, as well as providing a more digital and personalised support experience.
The new features include:
- Nokia Digital Assistant will provide live network information, on top of 19 data sources introduced last year, allowing engineers to quickly access technical information and see what is happening in their networks.
- AI based workflow optimisation which is designed to simplify software maintenance and reduce resolution time. Automation across the supply chain will speed up hardware maintenance and replacements.
- Nokia Learn will leverage mobile advanced learning methodologies to keep engineers up-to-date and integrate their training into their working day.
Omnisperience View
Helping service providers maintain their network quality and fix faults faster has never been more challenging or more important. As operators roll out 5G networks along with more sophisticated quality-based B2B use cases, while at the same time maintaining a heterogeneous mix of older generations of networks, ensuring quality of service meets customer expectations is becoming ever-more challenging.
Reducing support and operational costs is a perennial issue for operators; but time-to-resolve is now even more important. Slow time-to-resolve will have direct financial and business consequences. Customers who don’t have digital confidence in their service provider will complain – often publicly – and churn. No operator can afford the brand impact of being perceived as a fault ridden operation that is slow to resolve issues. Moreover, SLAs may contain financial penalties, adding to the financial implications. This is an arms race: even as managing networks is getting harder, so customer expectations are rising as they become ever-more network dependent.
Part of the answer to this challenge is using AI to detect and resolve faults faster; another part is ensuring that engineers are up-to-date in a fast-changing environment, as well as sharing best practices.
In many ways these may only be small tweaks to Nokia’s capabilities in this area but they’re important ones. They demonstrate a company that is thinking hard about how to meet its customers’ needs today while proactively working to improve their business and operational performance tomorrow. This is always a welcome and positive sign in a supplier.
