Good morning.
AT&T has been leaning into A.I. for quite some time, and now the company is adding ChatGPT to its roster.
The telecom giant announced on June 20 a generative A.I. tool called "Ask AT&T" that will be rolled out internally over the next few weeks. AT&T is initially using Microsoft’s OpenAI ChatGPT function, but the tool is designed to be interoperable with other generative tools.
To find out more, I sat down with Pascal Desroches, senior executive vice president and CFO at AT&T. Generative A.I., he tells me, is “something that's important for us to take advantage of from a business standpoint."
Rather than employees using ChatGPT externally on their own in a way where customer data may not have been secure, AT&T leadership decided to "work with Microsoft to create a proprietary instance for us that will allow us to have the same functionality, but be able to do it in a way that protects and secures our data," Desroches says.
Employees initially plan to use Ask AT&T "to help coders and software developers across the company become more productive,” which includes updating legacy computer code such as COBOL, Desroches tells me. Employees can also use it to translate customer and employee documents into other languages.
How about generative A.I. when it comes to financial applications? Not yet, Desroches explains, but there could be future use cases. “It will only allow us to get better,” he says, adding that the company already is using A.I. and machine learning when it comes to finance. “We use predictive A.I. in helping us determine what's the likely loss on our customer billings, to help us predict how much write-offs we’ll have on receivables, and to help us identify anomalous behavior that could potentially be fraud."
AT&T is in the process of a multiyear effort to save $6 billion, and A.I. certainly can help improve efficiencies. “Not necessarily related to generative A.I.,” he says, but "it's allowed us to reduce employee efforts by nearly 17 million minutes annually—it's hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“We’re also working with Nvidia to use A.I. in optimizing how we dispatch,” Desroches adds, along with deploying A.I. chatbots for customers “to appropriately route calls in our customer service centers." That's led to call volumes falling 30% to 40% over the last few years.
Having a strong grasp of the latest tech can only help finance chiefs, Desroches says.
“From the seat I sit in—and I imagine that for all CFOs—it's really important to understand the latest technology developments, and the latest political and economic environment you're operating under,” he says. “It will help you do your job better in allocating capital and understanding the world and the threats and opportunities posed to your business.”
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
