Black & Veatch Telecom Reaps Rewards of AI in Field Service

Data flows fast and furious among a distributed workforce, and digitalization and connectivity continue to replace more traditional methods of field and office management as companies strive for ever-greater efficiency and flexibility. This is particularly true for the telecommunications industry, with its large, distributed infrastructure projects and extensive field services workforce, where the availability of fast, seamless communication can make or break a project.

Telecom industry professional David Simmons was featured in a recent edition of CIO.com, which explored Black & Veatch’s ongoing efforts to embrace artificial intelligence and analytics to automate – and optimize – tasks within its telecommunications business.

To achieve this, the global engineering company has partnered with software startup Zinier to implement its intelligent field service automation platform, ISAC. The platform will allow Black & Veatch’s extensive field services workforce to deepen real-time visibility into the field, collect AI-driven recommendations, anticipate service disruptions, and improve operational efficiencies by automating front, back and field office tasks.

“Many offerings provide a sleek way to get data on a phone, but we ultimately chose Zinier because they stacked their technology atop algorithms for crowdsourcing the data,” Simmons said to CIO.com. “The differentiator is in getting data from upstream through intelligent automation into the hands of the field person.”