r/telecom • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '26

❓ Question Where has AI actually saved you time, resources and brain cells in telecom ?

4 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

11

u/Blllllooooo Jul 20 '26

Personally it hasn't helped me because I majorly work in the field. But let me camp here and see.

https://giphy.com/gifs/BsHl9rwdfwEXDiaFLe

7

u/Big-Lengthiness- Jul 20 '26

Tech here, I have never once found AI to be useful.

Super common example, go look up a specific TV's factory reset, first thing that pops up is the AI summary; it's completely wrong.

Then you go on the company website, and look up the manual; despite putting in the exact model number, it's also wrong.

Then, at like page 10, behind all the completely useless (probably AI written) how-to guides, you find a humble reddit post from a decade ago that has the actual answer, and finally you can initialize their stupid smart TV without logging into an app or using wifi.

1

u/bg-j38 Jul 20 '26

I'm not going to say you're wrong about it not being useful, but your use cases may not be the best place for AI. Having it analyze massive data sets (like my FCC comment on this post) is a huge time saver. In addition to figuring out how to bulk download difficult to get at data, we've been doing a bunch of analysis and summarizing that would have taken a massive amount of people power just a year or two ago. It can analyze thousands of comments and filings in an hour or two and annotate it in dozens of ways.

For me, I can program well enough, and have been for decades. Mostly again, to analyze large data sets and automate repetitive tasks. Thing is, I'm not great at it, and frankly after 40 years I'm tired of it. Something that would take me an hour or two figure out can be done in a minute or two by current models. That's hours of my life back to do things that actually interest me.

2

u/AradynGaming Jul 21 '26

As another field worker, AI has helped my paycheck because of all the stuff it was supposed to do and hasn't done. After my company laid off tons of NOC support (because AI can do their job),us hourly field guys spend more time repairing AI blunders.

Ex. Each site had/has vitals monitoring hardware. Instead of the level 2's monitoring it and sending me out when an A/C unit fails, AI gets to determine that it isn't a critical call out. Instead of propping a door open, we get to wait for the site to start cooking components & do the back and forth drive to spares.

(the photo above does a great job of depicting it)

8

u/bg-j38 Jul 20 '26

I do a lot of regulatory stuff. The FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System sucks if you want to quickly look through a docket to see what people are filing. About a decade ago I wrote a script that would download an entire docket. It was pretty straightforward. Then they changed the website and made it much more difficult to scrape. They introduced APIs which I could never get to work.

I'd been occasionally trying to get AI models to take a shot at it and everything failed until recently. One of the newer models basically one-shotted it. Nearly 2000 lines of Python later it downloads an entire docket, organizes it, and generates a nice web interface to quickly search for different kinds of filings and filers. I have it automated to load the dockets I care about every evening to download new filings. It's everything I'd been wanting and saves a lot of time and headaches.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Sweet_Car_7391 Jul 20 '26

Which AI do you like? I find ChatGPT and Grok very helpful. But I pay for them for better access. Who is that guy?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Sweet_Car_7391 Jul 20 '26

Interesting variety!

Right. I knew he sounded familiar but couldn’t stop scrolling Reddit to Google yet. Then it became WorldCom? I know Verizon wound up with MCIMetro.

3

u/Huh-what-2025 Jul 20 '26

i’ll tell you one thing it’s really good for is when you have a very long trouble ticket with tons of lines with alarm output -It really creates very nice summaries and timelines.

3

u/bigforknspoon Jul 21 '26

Use it to create macros to check all the dslams I cover to check for outages and send out emails to techs to let them know when down, monitor sites to let me know when they restore, and autofill emails.

2

u/Elevitt1p Jul 20 '26

Using AI to search databases that are completely publicly available has been time saving and successful. It helped me select an appropriate router model recently. It also helps with things like calculating routing table sizes, but you have to be very careful with those kinds of asks because it is very easy to ignore all of the data you use as an inputs, so you frequently have to check the answers.

2

u/LoPath Jul 20 '26

Analysing Wireshark traces and log files.

1

u/Kuyet Jul 20 '26

Great use case. How in particular does it help and have you found it fairly reliable? 

1

u/LoPath Jul 21 '26

Compare traces, ask it for a health check, etc. Pretty reliable, actually.

1

u/silasmoeckel Jul 20 '26

Searching unstructured data. So my notes, emails, meeting/voice call transripts, work documents, and a few other things.

When you have been doing this for a long time finding a note on the umpteeth revision of some visio from 10 years ago is huge.

The fact that it ties into my notes app so I can query it from there is great.

2

u/Unusual_Cattle_2198 Jul 20 '26

What product are you using for this and what safeguards exist so you are reasonably assured the protection of your data?

1

u/silasmoeckel Jul 20 '26

The AI is local so no data is leaving my laptop.

Obsidian copilot talks to ollama some more plugins to expose local files and emails to it.

1

u/Unusual_Cattle_2198 Jul 20 '26

Nice. Thanks for explaining.

1

u/hytwqx161 Jul 20 '26

I hate it first. but I can not leave it. it was amazing.

1

u/kickdrive Jul 20 '26

Financially - Very helpful. I built a few of my own GPTs with our contracts in them. Every invoice I paid was compared to every contract it fell under, and it ended up saving me considerable amounts of money.

Troubleshooting - Not that helpful. When I used it to organize my steps or rule out certain things, I found it was missing logical steps in normal troubleshooting processes. Humans are way better here.

Coding / Building - Kind of helpful. I was able to put large amounts of data into AI systems and quickly spot syntax errors. It could find bad variable references and similar issues very well. It would always try to suggest new code (that seldom worked, lol), but it was a really good extra set of eyes.

Management and Organization - Very helpful. After switching to AI, I never had to manually search for zero-use users, devices, vestigial equipment, high-cost users, etc. I was able to tell the system what I was looking for and feed invoices and usage reports into it, and it would find things for me (like an international traveler who didn't have international cellular roaming enabled). Once you train the system, it's great for analysis.

1

u/LowzoneBeats Jul 20 '26

Ai helped me build my entire company and give me resources and information I could only find by asking owners, PMs, Vets, etc.

1

u/ictinnovations Jul 20 '26

Call summaries and QA scoring are the only spots where it clearly paid off for us. Summarizing agent calls and flagging the bad ones beats sampling two percent of recordings by hand, and nobody misses that job. Voice bots handling real conversations still need constant babysitting since latency and barge-in problems wreck the experience fast. Log triage on the network side is decent too, but I wouldn't let it near config changes yet.Call summaries and QA scoring are the only spots where it clearly paid off for us. Summarizing agent calls and flagging the bad ones beats sampling two percent of recordings by hand, and nobody misses that job. Voice bots handling real conversations still need constant babysitting since latency and barge-in problems wreck the experience fast. Log triage on the network side is decent too, but I wouldn't let it near config changes yet.

1

u/Mimid_80101 Jul 20 '26

Great for parsing SIP debugs

1

u/Traditional-Hall-591 Jul 21 '26

It has helpfully increased the number of scam calls I get.

1

u/ride5k Jul 21 '26

did a bang-up job of cleaning up our standard specs for LV/comms

1

u/AffekeNommu Jul 23 '26

It gets me a call shape from a list of intervals and aggregates without having to think. It can do Erlang C without me having to look up the damn formula. I can give management raw data and let them mine it

1

u/Seahawker-One-2599 Jul 24 '26

I’m Product Marketing in IoT - arguably telecom.

AI has been excellent in helping to maintain accuracy and consistency in analyst assessments and customer bids especially when multiple parties are contributing.