NBN to shift towards an agentic AI strategy

“We’re at the point now where we’re trying to move [our AI strategy] into agentic, looking at ways that we can be predictive, the way that we can see into the network and fault-find and do that automatically and effectively,” Halliday said at the AWS Summit in Sydney.

Halliday added that while it wants to extend visibility, it does so carefully, knowing the risks the technology presents.

“We don’t do that without being cautious with regard to the way we approach that ... but where we see this emerging is that, we are a [network] wholesaler through our retail providers, so how we can use the capability to expose more of the network data to retailers and the broader industry to bring the whole industry along on that journey with us,” he said.

For this and the entire approach to AI, Halliday said NBN Co has adopted a “dual-speed” approach to ensure that the company can maintain fast adoption and innovation while also ensuring implementation is safe and does not present a risk to critical infrastructure.

“We need to be very conscious with regard to how we expose anything that we do across the broad industry. We also need to be very conscious of [taking] a dual speed type approach to how we go about developing AI, where our core capabilities need to be maintained and maintained with high resilience and capability, whereas you can do far more innovation at the edge,” he said.

“We are looking at, how do we actually manage and balance between those two functions.”

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Alongside the increased retailer visibility, Halliday said NBN Co also wants to improve the resilience of its network using AI.

“Our aim is to make our network more predictive, self-healing and adaptive, and we see the use of AI in those environments making that possible. That then serves our customers and then through our retail providers to the end customers across the nation,” he said.