AI Skeptics: Is AI Going to Take Your Job?
No, AI is not coming for your job.
AI isn’t going to take your job away, but it will make your job better. In this AI Skeptics event hosted by Juniper, a panel of experts busts some of the myths and misinformation around AI, particularly focusing on networking.
You’ll learn
The fundamentals of AI: what it is, what jobs it can do, and how it is changing our work and roles
The panel’s thoughts on the value AI is going to bring to IT ops and networking organizations
The impact and implications of AI on skills and education
Who is this for?
Host
Guest speakers
Transcript
0:00 [Music]
0:06 hi everyone i'm dr sally eaves chair of
0:09 global cyber trust at cf cyber and ceo
0:12 of aspirational futures a huge warm
0:14 welcome to this juniper networks ai
0:16 skeptics event is ai going to take my
0:19 job we're here to bust some of the myths
0:22 and miss some misinformation around ai
0:24 particularly focusing on implementations
0:26 within ai and networking to do so i'm in
0:29 great company so first of all i'm going
0:31 to ask our stellar panel just give a
0:33 brief intro into their role darryl can i
0:35 start with you first yeah hi sally great
0:37 to be here um my name's daryl i work for
0:40 aston martin as the league network
0:42 architect and the team leader i'm in
0:45 charge of all the wired and wireless
0:47 connectivity right the way from your
0:49 desk all the way up to the main main
0:51 site so uh yeah that's me brilliant
0:54 stuff thank you baby sheamus over to you
0:56 next
0:56 hi my name is james mcgillicuddy i'm the
0:58 vice president of research and
1:00 enterprise management associates an
1:01 analyst firm and based in the united
1:03 states and
1:05 i've i do a lot of market research and
1:08 consulting
1:09 on
1:10 network infrastructure and operations
1:12 teams how they design build and operate
1:14 their networks brilliant thank you so
1:16 much for joining us today and next week
1:17 to you tom
1:19 my name is tom hollingsworth and i am an
1:21 independent analyst in the networking
1:23 community i work with a lot of other
1:25 independent analysts through an event
1:27 series called tech field day
1:29 but i do a lot of research into emerging
1:31 technologies such as artificial
1:33 intelligence you can see some of my
1:35 thoughts on that subject at my blog at
1:37 networkingnerd.net fantastic that's
1:39 brilliant i've attended one of those
1:40 days as well really really enjoyable so
1:42 thank you for that so perhaps we can get
1:44 straight in now to some of our key
1:46 questions and maybe let's start first
1:48 was the fundamentals so looking at what
1:50 ai is what jobs it can do within it and
1:53 networking and changing changing the
1:55 work that we do and has it changed you
1:57 and your roles and your organizations so
1:59 far now for me i'll come at this quickly
2:01 from two hats so one is a cto by
2:04 practice but also as a change manager as
2:06 well so particularly in telecoms i've
2:07 seen this in kind of three main pillars
2:09 so optimizing user experiences
2:12 simplifying operations and also this
2:13 move from reactive to more active
2:15 intelligence and end-to-end insights if
2:17 you will so i'd love to kind of go
2:18 around the table and kind of explain
2:20 those key fundamentals to your audience
2:22 today perhaps gerald can i go to you
2:24 first
2:25 yeah sure um so ai for us we're still
2:27 quite new into evaluating ai and we're
2:30 starting to deploy that into our
2:31 infrastructure
2:33 ai for us is not about kind of replacing
2:36 anyone it's about and this is a great
2:38 quote i heard the other day in a
2:39 training course ai is not about
2:42 replacing humans with robots it's about
2:45 taking the robot out of the human um and
2:48 it leaves you to get on with things like
2:50 strategy and high level things that the
2:52 business can can value i i use the
2:55 analogy of uh of a car then we we have
2:58 car sat navs um satnav's never replaced
3:02 the driver it just gave you a tool to be
3:05 a better uh more alert driver um so i
3:09 think that's uh that's how we should
3:11 view ai at the moment so yeah i love it
3:13 it's that complimentary partnership
3:14 coming to the forum what you were
3:16 discussing there i love that i love it a
3:17 good analogy that's great daryl thank
3:19 you and tom could i ask for your
3:20 perspective well i actually want to jump
3:22 on daryl's analogy there because one of
3:24 the things that i think that ai has been
3:26 very critical in doing is helping us
3:29 understand
3:30 how to modify systems and how to kind of
3:33 roll with the punches if you will part
3:35 of what we have spent so many years
3:37 doing in the networking space is kind of
3:40 dealing with the little fires that pop
3:42 up and if you think of it kind of using
3:45 daryl's analogy as a sat nav
3:47 i remember the days when satnav was
3:49 effectively going online
3:51 and downloading a list of directions
3:53 from a website like mapquest and lord
3:55 help you if you took the wrong turn at
3:57 step four because from that point
3:59 forward you were completely lost but a
4:02 sat nav not only gives you the overview
4:04 of what you're trying to accomplish but
4:05 it can course correct in the middle of
4:07 your journey so if for example there is
4:10 a car accident that you must
4:12 route around or in modern sat nav with
4:16 capabilities to include more
4:18 intelligence if there is a congested
4:21 route that has become congested since
4:23 the start of your journey it can
4:25 automatically reroute you based on
4:27 certain factors like least amount of
4:29 time traveled or
4:30 whether or not you're going to have to
4:31 pay a toll on the road so it gives you
4:33 this capability to be smarter about what
4:36 you're doing instead of just relying on
4:38 the same old tried and true directions
4:40 that we've been following for a number
4:42 of years i love us great example also
4:44 what i love there is the ability to
4:46 personalize to what matters to you
4:48 whether that's that cost of the toll or
4:50 the shorter journey or environmental
4:52 impact even as well it's a great example
4:54 and james did you have any final
4:55 thoughts on that yourself
4:57 yeah sure um one thing
4:59 from my perspective one thing i see is a
5:01 lot of network operations tools and the
5:03 network monitoring network performance
5:05 management tools they excel at uh
5:07 presenting data to
5:10 admins engineers
5:12 they don't always
5:13 do a very good job of providing insights
5:15 they they point you to indicators of a
5:18 problem don't really tell you what the
5:19 problem might be
5:21 all the time
5:23 ai technologies are
5:26 sort of providing
5:27 those first
5:29 intelligent insights into the data that
5:31 those tools
5:33 typically provide
5:34 absolutely excellent thank you so much
5:36 for sharing that so let's go back to the
5:38 heart of our kind of question our title
5:40 for our event today is ai going to take
5:42 my job let's drill into that for the
5:44 audience because again it's something
5:46 that's grabbed a lot of headlines over
5:47 recent years although i think the
5:48 narrative is changing certainly for me
5:50 it's not about this replacement it's
5:52 that complementary strengths i mentioned
5:53 at top and also robots kind of taking
5:56 things out of humans for example and you
5:58 know making more time for meaningful
5:59 activity so shame if i could go back to
6:01 you and some of your research in this
6:02 area yes um i uh did some market
6:06 research on
6:07 network operations team interest in uh
6:10 ai uh last summer we surveyed a few
6:13 hundred
6:14 people who are actively engaged in using
6:17 this technology there wasn't a lot of
6:19 concern about
6:21 losing your job uh
6:23 there's a lot of
6:25 there was a sense that this can deliver
6:27 a lot of value to to make things run
6:30 better like one of the one of the early
6:32 use cases we were seeing uh
6:34 with a lot of traction was just the idea
6:37 of
6:38 more intelligent alerting and
6:39 escalations of events so that um
6:44 the alerts um connect the dots uh you
6:47 know there's a lot of contextualization
6:49 of data in those alerts um
6:52 more so than you may have seen in the
6:53 past and and also
6:55 uh the system gets smarter about routing
6:58 it to the right person that has the
6:59 expertise to take action on those alerts
7:02 although
7:03 when the alerts get uh smarter uh and
7:06 more contextualized uh people with less
7:08 sophisticated engineering skills can
7:09 actually take action more often so it
7:12 empowers people with with lower skills a
7:14 lot of the time that typically would
7:16 have just escalated something to a tier
7:18 three engineer rather than trying to
7:20 deal with it themselves so that's one
7:22 big thing that we saw in our research
7:25 fantastic really interesting i love that
7:26 one around that democratization of the
7:28 ability to take agency and to take
7:30 action um to more and more roles that's
7:32 really really interesting thank you and
7:34 daryl what are you seeing
7:36 yeah so um i can take that a step
7:38 further and and go on from what shane's
7:40 just saying there in some real world uh
7:42 uh examples there we've been deploying
7:44 and testing the the ai platform at the
7:47 moment um and it's um it's starting to
7:49 identify things that we might not have
7:51 known about and one particular one is uh
7:54 bad cable about network cable now
7:57 historically you wouldn't have
7:59 necessarily known that straight away um
8:01 it might manifest itself in a site is
8:05 you know poor performance or something
8:07 um but in order to identify that you
8:09 need to trawl through an awful dollar
8:11 logs and look at errors on interfaces
8:14 and and things like this so ai can pull
8:17 all that log files and alerting all into
8:20 one place and say hey you know what i i
8:23 think this is a bad cable on this
8:24 particular interface here um you might
8:27 want to look at this and so it goes back
8:29 to that is it going to replace me and
8:31 the answer to that is is absolutely no
8:34 you you find yourself between two
8:36 extremes at the moment and this is where
8:38 i see things going on the one extreme
8:40 you've got oh we're getting an alert for
8:42 bad cable we'll ignore it because people
8:45 turn off their pcs all the time on the
8:48 other extreme we'll get oh it's a bad
8:50 cable i'm going to go and replace it
8:52 because the ai told me to that cable
8:54 might be the uplink for the site and so
8:57 it's kind of like an extra pair of hands
8:58 just guiding you in that direction to
9:00 say hey you know what you might want to
9:02 go and have a look at this and that
9:04 saves you an awful lot of
9:05 troubleshooting because it's already
9:07 correlated that uh that data so at the
9:10 moment we're seeing ourselves in in that
9:12 balance and um it's definitely going the
9:13 right way so it's really promising at
9:15 the moment
9:16 i love that almost takes us back to that
9:18 analogy and sat nav earlier doesn't it
9:20 you've got a myriad of paths and it's
9:21 filtering out that noise into what's the
9:23 optimum direction and path to take so i
9:25 really like that excellent and tom what
9:26 are you seeing there particularly around
9:28 that kind of single source of truth
9:29 aspect i think it's really interesting
9:31 well it's interesting that a lot of
9:33 people have have looked at this ideal of
9:35 having a single source of truth for your
9:37 network but if you asked most engineers
9:39 or operations teams today what is the
9:42 state of your network they would go to
9:44 some kind of a design document and say
9:46 oh well this is what it looks like and
9:48 my first question when someone does that
9:50 is okay now what does the network
9:52 actually look like
9:53 and that usually throws them for a loop
9:54 because well no no it's supposed to be
9:56 like this and i'm like
9:57 von mulkey said that no plan survives
9:59 contact with the enemy well no network
10:01 configuration survives implementation
10:03 and so there's even if there's a little
10:05 bit of a disconnect between what you
10:07 intended to put out and what was
10:09 actually configured those two
10:11 disconnects create two sources of truth
10:14 desired state and actual state
10:17 and nobody wants to do the investigation
10:20 work to find out what actual state is
10:22 there's a quote that can be attributed
10:23 to kurt vonnegut it's a flawed human
10:25 nature that everybody wants to build but
10:26 nobody wants to do maintenance and
10:28 that's effectively what this is is going
10:30 out to figure out what's going on so
10:32 what you can use an ai platform to do is
10:35 to find out what current state is
10:37 implementation
10:38 and compare it to desired state and to
10:41 try to find out where the disconnect
10:43 happened in those two was it
10:45 unintentional i copied a configuration
10:47 to a switch or i had some kind of a
10:49 staging server that had an error in the
10:50 middle of deployment and now suddenly
10:53 the switch thinks it's the spanning tree
10:54 root for the whole network or was it
10:56 intentional where you have someone who
10:58 has a lot more skill than they think
11:02 they do
11:03 and says oh well i know that every time
11:04 i try to put this on that particular
11:06 model of switch it fails so i'm going to
11:08 modify this command just a little bit so
11:10 that what actually goes under the switch
11:11 works
11:12 even if the intention was pure what
11:15 you've created is a disconnect in state
11:17 where a command later on or some kind of
11:19 a desired uh deployment could fail
11:22 because of something you had no clue
11:24 about what happened because of the
11:26 disconnect between those two and
11:28 part of the reason why humans don't like
11:30 this is because maintenance is boring
11:32 it's mind-numbing
11:33 and an ai doesn't sleep it doesn't get
11:37 tired it will not stop until it does
11:39 exactly what it's been told to do
11:41 and what it returns is the truth as it
11:44 sees it it is not trying to save its job
11:47 it is not trying to get a promotion it's
11:49 not trying to make somebody else look
11:50 good it is telling you what it found so
11:53 you can trust it you may not inherently
11:56 believe it but you can trust that the
11:58 answers that it's returned are accurate
12:01 i love that it's a really really good
12:02 example there and sheamus can i bring
12:04 you back in as well because i know we
12:06 spoke previously you were drilling in a
12:08 bit more as about how it helps find out
12:10 the how you know how things are broken
12:12 for example not just how to fix
12:13 something that's a really interesting
12:14 take as well
12:15 i remember having a conversation with um
12:18 a network operations manager a couple
12:21 years ago who he told me like he might
12:23 have 7 000
12:25 interfaces down on his network he only
12:28 cares about the ones that matter um
12:30 if there's applications that are trying
12:32 to run over there's interfaces he wants
12:33 to fix somebody it points to the fact
12:35 that um a lot of
12:37 tools that network operations teams use
12:39 do not provide actionable insights uh
12:41 typical enterprise
12:43 tells in our research a typical net ops
12:46 team less than half of alerts being
12:49 pumped out by their tools are actionable
12:51 like indicators of actual problems and
12:53 so there's a lot of noise that needs to
12:55 be sorted through first before you even
12:57 try to fix something to figure out if
12:59 it's actually
13:00 broken if there's actually something
13:02 broken that needs to be fixed
13:04 and then yeah once once you figure out
13:06 something's broken you need to know
13:08 how it broke uh not just how
13:11 how to fix it um
13:13 because you don't want it to break again
13:14 um
13:15 so
13:17 you know you have to be thinking about
13:18 proactive problem prevention and
13:20 optimization as you're troubleshooting
13:22 ai can sort of help you do that because
13:24 ai kind of connects the dots um look at
13:26 how the network is looking at how the
13:28 network is serving the business and
13:30 how to optimize that it will open up the
13:32 opportunity for more problem solving
13:35 that that improves how it improves the
13:37 network's ability to serve the business
13:39 not just fighting fires but but um
13:41 preventing those fires from ever
13:44 happening over the last like 10 years
13:46 our research has shown that
13:49 between 30
13:51 30 and 40 of all it service degradations
13:55 are detected by end users before it
13:57 operations is aware of them
13:59 that means they're reporting them to the
14:01 help desk and they're not being not
14:03 being productive because of those
14:05 problems
14:06 to some extent
14:07 before net ops is even responding uh you
14:11 need to you need to turn that around you
14:12 need to get that closer to as close to
14:14 zero as possible i think
14:16 ai can can help you get there to some
14:18 extent
14:20 absolutely there's a key point there i
14:21 think two pillars of what you were
14:23 saying really struck me a that move to
14:25 be more proactive as you were just
14:26 talking about there that active
14:28 intelligence i said at the top but also
14:30 the ability to filter out the noise and
14:32 one thing i read some research i've been
14:34 involved in it was looking at for
14:35 example burnout in a lot of operations
14:37 team and that was one of the biggest
14:38 contributors to that and also to churn
14:40 as well so again making a huge
14:42 difference in that respect as well so
14:44 really interesting points all around
14:45 there fantastic
14:46 and perhaps we can now drill into that
14:48 impact point so around your
14:50 organizations what have you seen ai
14:52 delivery in particular how have you been
14:54 able to demonstrate that value across
14:55 the organization and what other
14:57 implications is this brought about
14:58 particularly around skills and education
15:00 which implicit first acknowledged that's
15:02 a real strong point area for me i really
15:04 love looking at that area too so perhaps
15:06 we can bring all those points together
15:07 look at the impact and the implications
15:09 and perhaps shameless if i could go back
15:10 to you first well as you're bringing ai
15:12 in the organization uh one thing that
15:16 you're going to see is um
15:19 many
15:20 people in your your it ops organization
15:23 are
15:24 not confident in their ability to
15:25 evaluate ai they have multiple vendors
15:28 telling them that they've developed ai
15:30 technology machine learning technology
15:32 that can transform operations they don't
15:34 know how to
15:36 determine whether
15:38 what they're being sold is is just a
15:40 bill of goods or not
15:42 um
15:43 they also want to know that there's a
15:46 variety
15:47 of um of network data that's being used
15:50 to train those algorithms like are the
15:52 is the is the training that that this
15:55 vendor
15:56 does with its algorithms going to you
15:59 know be representative of what i see in
16:00 my network like are they are they are
16:03 they training this in a realistic way so
16:04 it's actually going to understand
16:05 networking um so that's uh something
16:08 that we've seen uh early on
16:11 those are the types of things that they
16:12 want to see i've also heard people say
16:14 you know i want to just get past the
16:15 like people specifically told me like
16:17 architects and
16:18 fortune 500 companies
16:20 fortune 100 companies
16:22 who say there's a lot of marketing
16:25 to speak a lot of buzzwords going around
16:28 they just want to know how you're
16:30 solving problems like how you solving
16:31 the problems that i have can you show me
16:33 examples of that so that i know like
16:36 what this can do that's something that
16:38 they want to be able to take back to
16:39 their organization be like hey look what
16:40 i saw you know this is this i think this
16:42 is something that we could use to really
16:44 uh change the way we we manage our
16:46 network here
16:48 at those tangibles those examples so so
16:50 important make it relatable to that
16:52 particular sector and that clarification
16:54 you're spot-on around language i think
16:56 zero trust would be a classic example of
16:58 that uh doing something on that earlier
17:00 on today and again that's somewhere
17:01 where there's quite a lot of confusion
17:02 so getting that right and making sure
17:04 there's not misinformation absolutely
17:06 critical as well so i love that tangible
17:08 focus and tom what do you see in your
17:10 area
17:11 so a lot of the unease about deploying
17:13 ai within an organization comes from two
17:15 different areas the first is that it's
17:17 going to take my job away and and we've
17:19 kind of talked a little bit about that
17:20 throughout this whole thing but more
17:22 importantly there are a lot of people
17:24 that don't feel comfortable with the
17:25 idea that an ai is going to be able to
17:28 determine what the source of your
17:29 problem is instantaneously and give you
17:31 a recommended fix it kind of eliminates
17:34 that that kind of feeling that we get
17:36 when we we figure out a really hard
17:37 problem like working in sudoku or trying
17:40 to figure out a puzzle and we get that
17:41 rush of endorphins when hey this is the
17:43 the secret and i figured something out
17:46 to combat that second problem um you
17:49 kind of have to get into a mode where
17:51 you're you're communicating more
17:52 effectively and you're using ai as a
17:55 tool to do that how many times has your
17:58 average engineer ops person kind of been
18:00 under the crunch because there's a huge
18:02 problem that we need to fix and the
18:03 executives are frustrated and something
18:05 needs to happen and you're sitting here
18:07 literally racking your brain trying to
18:09 find out what the source of the problem
18:10 can be eliminating choices one at a time
18:14 to them you look like an ai because you
18:16 are doing the same kind of learning and
18:18 analysis that an ai would do to spit out
18:21 an answer they trust you because you're
18:23 a living breathing person we should
18:25 trust ai in the same way we should still
18:27 communicate we should still tell people
18:29 what happened and and more importantly
18:31 even if ai is the solution that
18:34 solve that problem we do need to tell
18:36 people that ai came up with that um we
18:38 in my old job as a managed service
18:40 provider we used to have a saying on the
18:42 the wall if you didn't tell your
18:43 customers that you fixed something did
18:45 you actually fix anything in a way users
18:47 need the same kind of reassurance inside
18:49 of your organization
18:51 but the other thing that is very
18:52 important is that people need to look at
18:53 ai not as a way for them to have their
18:56 jobs taken away
18:57 but it will remove tasks from your jobs
19:00 kind of like daryl said we're taking the
19:01 robot out of the person think about all
19:03 the things that you do on an average day
19:05 that are just repetitive and boring and
19:07 mind-numbing but necessary that having
19:11 that taken off of your plate having that
19:12 given to something that will not stop
19:15 will always accomplish the results and
19:16 send you a report telling you what it
19:18 did frees you up to think about other
19:21 things to spend more time building and
19:23 imagining and creating instead of doing
19:25 maintenance and i think that that
19:27 framing helps people understand you're
19:30 not going to lose your job in fact
19:31 you're probably going to get effective a
19:33 promotion to something more exciting and
19:36 new
19:37 and that's a good thing overall
19:39 absolutely it's that changing of the
19:41 narrative isn't it and the word
19:42 enablement is kind of ringing through my
19:43 eyes when we were describing these
19:45 different aspects around around this
19:46 today so couldn't agree more strongly
19:48 tom absolutely daryl did you have any
19:50 final thoughts on this around that value
19:53 also the skills implications of this
19:54 piece too sure yeah i mean we're
19:57 starting off quite small with ai at the
20:00 moment we are a small team and so we
20:02 can't bring in something in big bang
20:04 because you know there's a there's only
20:06 there's only three of us now um so we're
20:08 starting off very small where we see a
20:10 little bit of not so much resistance but
20:12 um our operations teams uh our service
20:15 desk network operations and so on um
20:18 they don't um they don't dislike ai they
20:21 think you know everyone kind of accepts
20:23 okay this is a great tool where we do
20:26 find um maybe a little bit of pushback
20:28 is with management and they say oh hang
20:30 on a minute is this is this just another
20:32 one of the toys that it's buying um so
20:35 we kind of say well actually no look
20:37 what we can do
20:39 before i had to count you know how many
20:42 mac addresses were on the network or how
20:44 many ip addresses were in use now i can
20:47 just ask
20:48 a high-level like language question like
20:51 how many users are on this site and it
20:54 gives me an answer and so management is
20:56 sort of seeing this and i'm demoing this
20:58 very informally it's almost like a
21:01 oh hey while you're here just have a
21:03 look at this you know it's just kind of
21:04 just as somebody passes by and uh and
21:07 we're seeing a lot of uh value from that
21:09 so um just having that very small um
21:11 focused uh uh try not so much trial but
21:15 um small focused deployment and growing
21:17 from there is uh it's hugely beneficial
21:20 yeah i really like that i like the fact
21:21 you're bringing to the floor as well
21:22 this could be an incremental change as
21:24 well so i love that that's really
21:26 important for a lot of businesses so
21:27 that's a great point thank you for
21:28 sharing that and with my telco hat on as
21:30 well certainly things that i've seen up
21:32 close and personal is around you know
21:33 faster problem solution that resolution
21:36 um fewer on-site visits for example as
21:38 well so you've got that big operator
21:39 benefit and equally from the consumer
21:41 you've got a better reliability
21:42 measurability huge point as well
21:44 unpredictability too so again that kind
21:46 of shared value proposition through ai
21:49 so perhaps as we start to bring all
21:50 these different elements to a close we
21:52 do a bit of a round table again and kind
21:54 of just bring each of you like a closing
21:56 thought to take away to share with the
21:58 audience it could be something that's
21:59 come out from this conversation or kind
22:00 of a top tip that might be relevant for
22:02 them wherever they are in their journey
22:04 towards implementing ai at the moment
22:05 and sheamus got to go for you first
22:08 one thing is um
22:09 most network operations teams have too
22:12 many tools um
22:14 they're using 10 15 20 tools monitor and
22:17 troubleshoot their infrastructure
22:20 ai
22:21 can
22:22 consolidate that i think quite a quite a
22:25 bit they can make some tools less
22:26 relevant they may not go away but that
22:28 you know the insight you're getting out
22:29 of the ai will
22:31 will lead to your people spending less
22:33 time going from tool to tool to tool to
22:35 get the answers they need because the
22:36 answers are in the ai
22:38 solution um depending on where it lives
22:40 i've heard from people saying i'd love a
22:42 ai solution just pulls all the data from
22:44 all my tools and presents it as a single
22:46 view with insight um
22:48 i think and once
22:50 once you see that um you see the value
22:53 um i also find you know people spend a
22:56 lot of time
22:58 just generating reports you know like
23:00 hey we got to audit this we need to know
23:02 what you know what what's what
23:03 is everything in compliance you know
23:05 they're golden configs
23:06 like i talked to people recently who who
23:09 devote 10 15 20 hours a week
23:11 generating reports
23:13 uh
23:14 i think
23:15 an intelligent solution can can optimize
23:17 that so
23:19 if you feel when you're doing stuff like
23:21 that like swiveling from tool to tool
23:23 the tool or generating reports over and
23:25 over again
23:26 not really delivering a lot of value to
23:27 the business like you're spending most
23:29 of your time just
23:31 doing repetitive tasks as everyone's
23:33 been talking about here you're not
23:34 demonstrating your value and when i'm
23:36 trying to understand the return on
23:38 investment in the tool like an ai
23:40 solution it's about
23:42 freeing up labor and allowing that labor
23:44 to do something that's more important to
23:46 the business
23:47 and that's what i think people should be
23:49 thinking about as they're looking at ai
23:51 is like how do i take my people who are
23:54 really knowledgeable and skilled and
23:56 empower them to support transformation
23:59 of our business not not keeping the
24:00 lights on but like you know spreading
24:02 the light elsewhere
24:04 i really like that bring up that
24:05 capacity for higher order work against
24:07 that changing of the narrative isn't it
24:09 so so important thank you so much and
24:11 tom over to you for your closing
24:12 thoughts
24:13 i really like a lot of the things that
24:14 sheamus said and i think that one of the
24:16 reasons why we kind of have this tool
24:20 aversion is because the tool is the
24:22 solution to whatever problem we have
24:24 so every time we come into a new issue
24:26 that we need to solve we we just go buy
24:29 something and make the problem go away
24:31 for a little while longer
24:32 and i think that people are looking at
24:34 ai like that oh great this is just
24:36 another tool that goes into the box that
24:37 i never use
24:39 change the thinking about what you're
24:40 looking to use ai for you're not buying
24:43 a tool you're hiring someone no it may
24:46 not be a flesh and blood person but you
24:48 are going to invest training in that
24:49 person you are going to give them tasks
24:52 and job roles that will multiply the
24:55 ability of your other
24:57 assets to get things done if you look at
25:00 it that way if you look at it as you are
25:03 hiring someone then you'll appropriately
25:05 invest in that person you'll give them
25:08 the capabilities they need to accomplish
25:10 the tasks and roles and responsibilities
25:12 and kind of like sheamus said then that
25:14 elevates the rest of the team because
25:16 now they're not spending hours of their
25:18 day tracing down log messages or
25:21 generating reports for the executives i
25:24 mean with a properly configured ai the
25:26 executives can request the report
25:27 whenever they like to see it and they
25:29 can verify that the information that's
25:31 in the report is good information that
25:34 they wanted and those are the kinds of
25:36 things that give you the capability to
25:39 spend more time doing more impactful
25:41 things generating revenue being more of
25:44 an asset to the company in the bottom
25:46 line as opposed to just doing the
25:48 regular maintenance task that nobody
25:50 wants to do
25:52 absolutely very well seth thank you so
25:54 much and daryl over to you for final
25:56 thoughts
25:57 great thanks a lot i can carry on from
25:58 what tom is saying there really i mean
26:00 i'm always telling the uh the operations
26:02 uh staff that uh progress is progress
26:05 whether you're fixing a vault or
26:07 deploying something progress is progress
26:10 sometimes it's small progress sometimes
26:11 it's big ai is not going to fix
26:14 everything all at once
26:16 and so i say
26:18 on tom's note there about think of it as
26:21 hiring another person it's higher in
26:22 that pair of hands to just progress your
26:24 fault along the right lines you don't
26:27 you're not throwing it all against the
26:28 wall and seeing what sticks ai really
26:31 focuses you and it just progresses you
26:33 forward in that incremental step that we
26:34 talked about earlier i don't mind if a
26:36 fault takes a long time to fix as long
26:38 as there's progress in that in that way
26:41 so then i can report to management and
26:43 say
26:44 it is taking a while but we're seeing
26:45 this progress and i think that's
26:46 definitely what ai is bringing us at the
26:48 moment
26:49 absolutely fantastic i think we brought
26:50 in you know a lot of themes for the four
26:52 here you don't need to know everything
26:54 you know all the plumbing so to speak
26:56 it's how you can work with ai it's
26:58 changing this narrative is this
26:59 complementary strengths aspect and going
27:02 from menial tasks to the meaningful how
27:04 we can get that higher order works i
27:06 think so many takeaways here a lot of
27:08 practical examples as well how we're
27:10 seeing organizations at different stages
27:12 using this within itn network so
27:14 fantastic thank you all three of you so
27:16 shameless tom darrell thank you so much
27:18 for joining us today and thank you all
27:20 for joining our webinar as well it's
27:21 been fantastic and a lovely discussion i
27:23 think one we can continue
27:25 great thank you very much
27:27 [Music]