How BT Group uses AI

BT Group runs the EE virtual assistant Aimee on Sprinklr's customer experience platform, drawing on BT Group data for personalized answers. The platform lets BT Group use generative AI for EE and BT customers, for example in an Aimee flow that prepares customers for international travel and in billing support, where generative AI gives detailed explanations of billing charges. BT Group says Aimee handles up to 60,000 conversations a week, double the volume of two years earlier, that the travel flow halved the need for chat support, and that it stays model agnostic behind a private cloud instance with safeguards against attempts to make the AI misbehave.

After trials in each of the UK's home nations, BT Group rolled out cell sleep software to more than 19,500 EE mobile sites. It puts 4G capacity carriers to sleep during quiet periods that machine learning has predicted for each site, wakes them automatically at busy times and within seconds when traffic surges unexpectedly, and can use a deeper sleep mode overnight. The sleep functions come from the radio equipment suppliers; BT Group's site data drives the statistical algorithms that control them. BT Group published an expected annual energy saving rather than a measured result.

BT's Digital Voice home phone service includes Enhanced Call Protect, an AI powered tool from Hiya that monitors incoming calls, diverts scam calls to a junk voicemail and shows a "Nuisance?" warning on the landline display for suspected spam, while showing the name of registered businesses. In its first four months it blocked more than 2.4 million scam calls and identified about 17.7 million spam calls. BT also runs an AI network level firewall against calls from abroad that use a UK number for scam purposes.

BT manages nearly 10 million in home Wi-Fi endpoints and says 60% of reported issues originate in the customer's home Wi-Fi environment. Nokia's Homeview combines its Home Device Manager, Service Management Platform and AVA Fixed Network Insights to give BT's more than 6,000 care agents a real time view of the home network. Bell Labs machine learning models applied to device telemetry predict poor performance, attribute the root cause and recommend configuration changes or software upgrades, which a Smart Assistant ranks for agents who then run automated fixes. Nokia reports a 5% improvement in first contact resolution, multi million pound annual savings from fewer truck rolls and a few hundred thousand fewer troubleshooting calls a year.