Chris Williams

‘The biggest challenge we have faced in CFL regarding AI services is deciding where to start!’

Part of the AI Leadership Index – a curated list of the most inspirational figures shaping the AI revolution.

Chris Williams has been CIO at Community Fibre for 4 years during which time the business has seen exponential customer growth whilst maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. Chris has led a large-scale digital transformation including the implementation of several AI use cases. Use cases that have been implemented include Procurement, Customer Help and Support, Security, Call Centre, Digital, IT and in Network Operations

Chris has previously worked in various roles at BT, EE and Orange.

Please share a case study of how you have you innovated with AI over the last year?

AI has been deployed in several areas in Community Fibre. The journey started with Procurement where there are a number of use cases including checking contracts versus standard clauses, reviewing exit dates and never missing a renewal. Help and support has been undertaken to give customers a better search experience when dealing with issues.

On the IVR, calls are recorded, transcribed and summarised for agents which enables an average handle time saving. Customer sentiment during the call is calculated and calls analysed into themes which is supporting improvement activity. Customer calls with low sentiment can be analysed and followed up with the customer if required.

Our Marketing team are starting to use AI to build content for use in campaigns Our operations team are using AI to help resolve faults including summarising information from detailed support guides for easy consumption. Our IT and Digital teams are using AI for code creation and troubleshooting, and our security team are using AI to help spot phishing emails and reduce the volume of these hitting user accounts.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced with AI innovation and how you have overcome it?

The biggest challenge we have faced in CFL regarding AI services is deciding where to start! So many aspects of the business would benefit from AI services and there is a need for them to drive efficiency. We also know we can significantly benefit our customers.

We laid out a vision and a blueprint architecture to ensure we were not taking a scattergun approach. Our approach was to join services from our partners with carefully selected LLM's to create our AI services, delivering these to the points for greatest need for the customer and business through strict prioritisation.

Governance was added in the form of policy and delivery process to ensure we were using the right solution to the problem. Imagineering sessions were held to capture all the ideas to help form the roadmap which will continue to deliver over the coming years.

How do you balance innovation with ethical safeguards?

Everything we are doing with AI is to the benefit of customers. Typically, we start with the use case and look at the benefits which allows accurate prioritisation. Once the backlog is prioritised, we look at the solution required. This is not always AI but can be automation, data creation or a workflow. Only when we have selected AI as the vehicle for delivery do we commence work on it.

We have worked hard to ensure data is good quality and is controlled. We have built a policy for use which is in place across the business and use cases are judged against this policy by the leadership team. It also links to the data usage policy which is used to assess use cases. The use cases we have selected all follow the principles we have set out.

How do you believe the artificial intelligence space will change over the next 12-24 months?

Over the next 12-24 months, we believe we can build on the foundations we have laid to significantly improve the experience we give to our customers. We believe the traditional reactive service models will be changed to become more proactive and ultimately pre-emptive in nature.

We believe we should be spotting customer issues before the customer realises they have them and be able to take the appropriate action in advance of the customer needing to contact us.

We believe if a customer does contact us, we should be able to work out the intent of the call and be able to help the customer select the most relevant channel for resolution and, if this needs to be an assisted channel, to arm the agent with the right information to be able to resolve the issue efficiently.

We believe AI will make every aspect of our business more efficient. We think there are use cases in Customer Services, HR, Legal, Finance, Operations and IT and that everyone in our business will become more efficient as our AI services roll out.

It feels like we have started but are nearer the start rather than the end of the journey