Human ‘legacy’ will be replaced by 2025
The BT Group has said it will put its entire trust in Artificial intelligence (AI) to run its network operations, even in times of a crisis. The switchover to handing over responsibility from humans troubleshooters to ‘self healing’ by algorithm will take place by 2025. According to a new release, BT Digital has plans to dehumanise its operations and is consolidating all of BT Group’s application monitoring onto one automated system which will take complete responsibility for that aspect of the new service management stack.
Dynatrace
BT’s Digital unit has appointed Dynatrace to simplify and support the automation of issue detection across BT’s technology estate, replacing 16 existing monitoring systems. Savings are estimated at £28m by 2027 as resources are freed from ‘legacy’ issue detection and management people. Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer at Dynatrace, said a self-healing system will free BT’s teams from manual tasks, so they can focus on accelerating digital transformation. Dynatrace’s software intelligence platform will run across the entire BT Group, with the brief to ‘dramatically simplify’, add intelligence to and ultimately automate the service operations within BT. This mean that networks will be expected to self-heal, without human intervention, in a new AI Operations model supported by BT’s recently announced work with ServiceNow.
Trust the Algorithms
Can the fate of networks be entirely trusted to algorithms? Is AI robust enough? “Dynatrace gives us precise insight into our technology estate and consolidates all data in a single pane of glass,” said Jim Dempsey, Director of Service at BT. “It will let us improve predictability and drive faster resolutions, driving better customer experience.” The integration of Dynatrace will consolidate all data from across BT’s multiple cloud systems for fault detection, giving an omniscient view across the service path for any given customer, BT said. Dynatrace AI and automation can provide a deeper understanding of digital services, deriving signals from noise with root cause and delivering resilient operations for all applications and microservices. “This allows us to build early prediction and remediation through the previously announced investments in ServiceNow, an estate that heals itself in real time,” said BT in a statement.
Instant troubleshooting
In initial rollouts, Dynatrace claims it identified issues in real time, instead of the 30 minutes delay that was standard in the ‘old paradigm’ (AKA human intervention). The deep observability and advanced AIOps options delivered by Dynatrace have reduced the mean time to identify faults, ahead of the self-healing culture, well ahead of the target reduction of 50%. The expectation is that this will drive cumulative internal savings of £28m by 2027, in addition to a previously identified £25m of value from the ServiceNow implementation.