DECEMBER 2020CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM8IN MYOPINIONsource of much hype and many misplaced hopes and fears, artificial intelligence or `AI' is often presented as something impersonal and inhuman. Yet in the work I do, I see it as an enabler of improved human connectivity and more rewarding tasks and relationships, especially with our customers. My experience of AI is that it makes room for more natural, human relationships.I direct the customer support personnel for Nokia Global Services. The main task of my teams is to make sure that mobile radio products and solutions are introduced to our mobile operator customers smoothly and effectively. We now employ or build AI to help us in several different ways:1. Automation of services, such as advanced identification and correction of network issues, ideally before the customer is even aware of them2. Augmented intelligence, where customer service experts are presented with possible ways to troubleshoot the customer issue based on historical and real-time data3. More convenient and futuristic ways for customers to get help solving their own issues, such as chatbotsNokia is an engineering company and we build highly technical products that also need to work side by side with other vendors' products. Given the complexity of modern networks and the 5G era that we are entering, troubleshooting issues could become very time-consuming and expensive, especially when network outages can potentially affect so many subscribers. Is Intelligence Artificial if it Helps Build Better Customer Relations?MAIRIT HOLLSTÉN-VÄINÖLÄ, VP CUSTOMER SUPPORT, GLOBAL SERVICES, NOKIA [EURONEXT PARIS: NOKIA]Even with so much at stake, the root cause of an issue can often be minute and seemingly banal and therefore, easy to miss. Fortunately, network equipment can be designed to log even the most inconsequential of operational details. Unfortunately, no human being could ever sift and sort all the logged details to discover the issue. This is where AI can step in and use advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms to recognize patterns in the data. Over time, these algorithms will become more and more precise at identifying the probable causes of issues. Working closely with our service engineers, my future vision is that AI can eventually be trained to be very accurate; so accurate that it can trigger corrective actions and alerts, and the issue can be corrected before the customer is even aware of it.Thanks to AI and machine learning, the focus of a service engineer's work will shift from more repetitive tasks to analysis, troubleshooting, and accumulating and sharing knowledge. In this way, AI creates more opportunities for developing more fulfilling human skills and abilities.The second way we will use AI is to augment and improve our service to customers. Our customer service engineers have access to real-time data, but there is only so much data that a human can process. AI, on the other hand, can sift through huge amounts of data to look for patterns. In the future, AI will not only have access to the customer record, it can probably query the network itself, help the engineer with additional questions he or she could ask, even detect that a similar problem has been already described by another Mairit Hollstén-VäinöläA
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