BT Group Unveils AI Accelerator to Shorten Rollout of New AI from Six Months to Six Days

Our impact

• The use cases are a key output of BT Group’s delivery of a ‘digital brain’, allowing AI to be used to safely and ethically drive value for its customer-facing and corporate unit
• AI Accelerator will accelerate the production and ongoing support of AI models from 6 months, to 6 days
• Digital’s goal for data and AI is that the team underpin over £500m of internal value to the Group, in aggregate, over the next five years*

Digital’s goal is to underpin over £500m of internal value from data & AI in aggregate*, through improved customer experience and enhanced efficiency within each of the Group’s business units, over the next five years, and help power the transformation required to support BT Group’s long-term success.

Through the use of common frameworks and templates, AI Accelerator will drastically reduce the administrative and technical processes involved with taking a new AI use case from prototype to production. In keeping with BT Group’s Responsible Tech principles, AI Accelerator has built-in triggers to make sure that new AI use cases are properly assessed in line with the company’s data privacy, security and ethics principles, ensuring the safe and responsible use of AI across the business.

BT Group’s unique combination of tech talent, partnerships and the technology contained within AI Accelerator will reduce the core of this process from 6 months in April 2022, to 6 days by March 2023. This acceleration is a result of the standardisation of tools and data handling, as well as streamlined software update and monitoring, drawn from the enhanced automation and templated best practices provided by AI Accelerator, and frees up months of time for every data scientist and analyst tasked with bringing new use cases to life across the Group.

Coupled with the rise of modular, re-usable data products from within BT’s digital brain, the AI-powered intelligence layer on the Group’s data estate, it represents a major step forward in forging BT Group’s path to becoming an AI-led company.

The new MLOps platform was built in partnership between BT Group’s growing data & AI teams within its Digital unit, and Datatonic and adds to the partnership BT Group has for its data with Google Cloud.

Over time, AI Accelerator will provide ongoing monitoring of AI models in production across BT Group’s estate, flagging any ‘drift’ from baseline norms in the way the AI is consuming or deriving insight or outcomes from data. In this way, it will act as a scanner for the Group’s Digital Brain, continually assessing each model’s health and prompting expert data scientists where necessary to refine and optimise them. As a result, data scientists will have more time to focus on future data science projects, driving further innovation and accelerating use of AI across the Group, instead of constantly maintaining each AI model.

“Thanks to the work the team has done accelerating our migration into Google Cloud, we’ve a healthy testbed for AI Accelerator and are seeing it catalyse AI acceleration across the Group. As we progress, we’ll be able to track the health and the performance of our AI use cases in real time, ensuring consistent, safe, ethical delivery of value from our phenomenal data resources.” – Dr Zoe Webster, Artificial Intelligence Director, BT Group

AI Accelerator will allow the Group to accelerate its build, measure, learn process for new AI use cases, including, for example, churn/propensity models, or to test models that personalise our apps and services for customers, delivering better customer experiences and/or value within our business units. Many models are already live, generating value both from the identification of revenue opportunities for the Group (e.g. customer propensity models in BT Group’s Global business) and through driving efficiencies (e.g. network planning and fibre and ethernet build optimisation models for Openreach and BT Group’s Enterprise business).

* See Digital Business briefing, March 2022

“We’re really pleased to be working with BT on its AI Accelerator. It’s exciting and fulfilling to be at the heart of such a major transformation and we look forward to seeing growth in the impact of this world-class Machine Learning platform.” – Philip Richardson, BT Lead, Datatonic

With our track record of building next-generation MLOps platforms for companies such as BT, Sky, and Vodafone, we are really pleased to be working with Google Cloud to develop another strategic, innovative and scalable MLOps platform. We’re already witnessing the business impact it will bring to BT to improve customer experience, revenue per petabyte, increased margin and risk reduction.

For any questions about BT’s AI Accelerator or to get started on your MLOps journey, contact our team here.