NBN Co, AI 활용 사고 보고서 작성 및 현장 작업대 준비
NBN Co is expanding its artificial intelligence capabilities, incorporating ServiceNow’s Now Assist into its operational toolkit. The telecommunications company is using the platform to generate the “first cut” of post-incident reports and to streamline how field crews prepare for repairing damaged infrastructure, marking a flurry of new AI use cases across the business.
In a rare public appearance, Chief Information Officer Rob Sewell took the stage at ServiceNow’s World Forum in Sydney on Thursday to discuss the company’s AI ambitions. While NBN Co has long signaled its intent to embed AI into operations—and indicated in May that it was beginning to leverage agentic AI—Sewell revealed that the latest addition to its AI toolset is Now Assist, which encompasses both generative and agentic AI capabilities.
One of the first applications built with Now Assist is an agent designed to draft post-incident reports (PIRs) for internal IT disruptions. “An early use case [with Now Assist] was building a solution which would immediately do a first cut post-incident review after anything that happened in the IT space,” Sewell said. To ensure data security, he noted that incident information is scrubbed of potentially sensitive details before being passed to the agent, preventing confidential data from appearing in the final report.
Sewell also highlighted NBN Co’s growing reliance on AI-powered image analysis. This includes scanning imagery to determine when new residential or commercial developments are ready for NBN connection. “There’s always a very large number of those across the country,” he said. Additionally, the company is analyzing images to identify and accelerate the remediation of damaged infrastructure. “We do these things tens of thousands of times across the country during a year, [so we’re] making it more efficient [and] making it faster, [which] is better for us and for customers.”
Looking ahead, Sewell predicted that AI will significantly enhance NBN Co’s ability to support retail service providers and, by extension, broadband customers nationwide. “One phrase is ‘autonomous networks’, but really that means being able to better predict, detect [and] react to any changes that occur in the network across the country,” he explained. He also emphasized his focus on driving further AI-enabled efficiencies within the security and IT domains under his leadership. “My own team in security and IT are transforming the way we work,” he said.
A comprehensive responsible AI policy underpins the company’s expanding portfolio of AI initiatives. “The first thing we did [in going down the AI path] was make sure we actually had a really comprehensive responsible AI policy in place that reviews and manages every use case every time we deploy or use AI across the organisation,” Sewell said. While NBN Co initially explored AI for personal productivity improvements, it has since pivoted to higher-impact applications through targeted enterprise-wide training, sandbox environments that allow employees to experiment with tightly managed risk, and guided assistance for deploying more complex AI solutions in production environments.
Sewell noted that this AI initiative aligns with one of five pillars of NBN Co’s broader organizational strategy, centered on being “simple and digital, making our company more insight-driven, more technology-enabled, [and] more efficient in the way that we actually deliver for our partners and customers and the country.” “It’s an enterprise-wide shift,” he said. “Every part of the company contributes and benefits as we really embed digital by default in the way we work, we embed data driven processes even more in everything we do, and we really use AI responsibly. Our objective, obviously, is to make work easier, [and] to make service even better, not just to make it faster, so we simplify, then we digitise.”
Ry Crozier attended ServiceNow’s World Forum Sydney as a guest of ServiceNow.