By Steve Stine, AT&T Communications Chief Data Officer
At 142 years and counting it’s an exciting time at AT&T. Transformation is not new as we have over a century of experience with disruptive change. Since becoming Chief Data Officer of AT&T Communications’ first Chief Data Office (CDO) a year ago, I’ve seen great collaboration and innovation driving transformation at unprecedented speed.
Let’s begin with the data. We see more than 220 petabytes of data cross our network every average business day. That’s a lot of data – and it’s grown exponentially in the last few years. As technology advances, the volume and speed of data continues to increase and it’s no longer about gathering information, it’s about doing something with it. We’re turning that data into new solutions that empower our employees and operations with capability that will provide benefit where it matters most, our customers.
The CDO team has incredible partners across our company. Together, we’re driving innovation, and, most importantly, results – companywide. The benefits we’ve seen over the last year include hundreds of millions of dollars in cash savings and real business value. We did this with efforts like:
- We launched data analytics and AI to support the retail team’s distribution growth plans. With these tools, we’re more efficiently identifying new sites for stores and delivering new customer revenue in locations where you want us.
- We’re applying AI and machine learning to a constant flow of internal and external data to better forecast the best routes for our 50,000+ field technicians. This means less waiting on us and having the right tech for the job.
- Comprehensive analytics, machine learning and an AI-driven product help us predict root causes and inform us of affected equipment and customers for all network outages. The results? We process 15 million alarms per day and can predict outages before customers are impacted and call in to let us know.
The CDO’s partnership and focus on the business priorities ensures our customers are at the center of AT&T Communications’ evolution. This company was founded on a spirit of service and committed to advancing the next-generation technology to improve people’s lives. It started with inventing the telephone and continues as we’ve evolved to a modern media company. Our data assets coupled with AI solutions will help improve our customer experience and make us more efficient. The CDO team is excited to be at the forefront of this effort.
This is just the beginning and I look forward to sharing more.
