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Conway is one of four NCTC member companies that piloted the co-op’s new AI Center of Excellence, and the results were strong enough that the board has approved rolling it out to the full membership. This week’s Independent Show offered a chance for members to decide if they want to pay for the upcoming AI subscription offering.

Conway Corp., a city-owned utility in Arkansas, decided to start with AI for appointment confirmation. “We very narrowly focused that pilot specifically where document intelligence was there. We’ve got point of confirmation, voice and digital chat,” Conway Corp. CTO Jason Hansen said during a breakout session at the show. “It easily can expand out into trouble tickets, and that’s where we see the most value.”

The pilot was able to reduce 13 unproductive truck rolls due to customer responses and customers responded to notifications approximately 45% of the time. At a cost of about $100 per truck roll, preventing 20 unproductive truck rolls a month would get Conway to break even. In addition to trouble tickets, Conway is interested in using the program for self-service rescheduling. The pilot was done with third parties like cloud-based communications platform Twilio, but Conway’s data was always kept separate through the Azure hyperscale database platform.

Conway also participated in the NCTC voice chat pilot, a project Hansen described as more challenging. The number one reason customers call Conway is to find out how much their bill is—which spans telecom, water, wastewater and electricity. Even though that info is available in Conway’s app, people still call, so that’s where it decided to focus. “That use case meant that we had to authenticate a user, and we had to authenticate them with information that we weren’t going to send to the cloud,” such as the last four digits of their Social Security number, said Hansen. “We had to do some programmatic hashing of those data points so they could be checked against to verify. All of those were built. We trained it on customer manuals, on voice calls.”

Over 1,300 calls have come in around billing and about 40% were taken care of and never made it to a live agent. Hansen said the other 60% tend to need help with payment extension. “We’re authenticating almost 65% of the users before they even talk to a live agent. So our data in our system is good enough to identify 65% of users, whether it’s on their social that they provide, the PIN they provide or we recognize the phone number that they’re calling from and we can know who they are before we get started,” he said.

In May, NCTC surveyed members and the results solidified its plans. “What really shone through was members are using AI, but members don’t have a strategy. Members need governance help. They need help with understanding who are the right AI partners, and they need help with integration,” said Rob Smith, VP of Group Purchasing at NCTC.

To successfully launch these AI projects, it takes a lot of people and expertise that not every company has. “We have about 48 employees. We were dabbling in AI, but I don’t have the staff,” said Peter Curran, Cybersecurity & AI Architect for MTC (Margaretville Telephone Company). Like many of his peers, Curran was particularly concerned about governance. NCTC’s survey found 44% of member companies lack AI governance frameworks. “NCTC came to us with ‘it’s a work-in-progress, but a solution’… Also working with EY, a company that has a level of experience coming to this and bringing that to us, a small operator, is incredible.”

MTC’s pilot focused on document intelligence. “We have a treasure trove of company-specific material, and it’s in a drive, or you do a Word search or something to try to find what you’re looking for. It takes forever, and so this is a great solution for us,” Curran explained. On average, the AI document repository tool has seen around 11 inquiries per day—a number MTC hopes will grow as employees get more comfortable with using it. On average, feedback indicates the tool will save an employee about 3.5 minutes a day, with about 26 inquiries a day needed to break even on labor costs.

As a security leader, Curran takes comfort in that if someone puts in a query for material not in MTC’s database, they will be told, “I don’t know.” “That’s incredible for those who play with AI,” he said, explaining how it eases concerns the AI will hallucinate answers.

The fourth AI pilot focused on customer churn/retention marketing, analyzing customer behavior to identify churn risks and generate personalized retention strategies. “This is an ML model within the Azure platform that identifies the top 10% of your customer base that is likely to churn based on things like promo roll-ups, trouble tickets, outages, calls into a customer service center, things like that. The future of that will be not just the identification of the top 10% but the next best action,” said Smith. He said it’s in an earlier stage with more work to come.

Smith shared that the next 60 days or so will be spent making sure the offering is ready to be commercialized with a launch date targeted for around mid-September. There will be an ROI model that members can plug their specific data into to understand expectations.

“Every single operator here should reach out to NCTC and just have a conversation,” said Hansen. “It’s a great place to start, at least to see where they’re going. Maybe the three, four options that we have are not where you’re looking to be, but in six months there’s going to be more.”

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