Research from Eagle Hill Consulting reveals a staggering 68 percent of employees said they regularly spend time on low-value, inefficient work. At the same time, however, 81 percent claimed that their organization delivers quality products and services, suggesting that output is strong, but the process could be more efficient. Indeed, according to the Wrike 2024 Impactful Work Report, organizations waste more than $15,000 per employee per year on inefficient ways of working. And while some might argue that workers can be reluctant to uncover or even protective of inefficiencies in order to protect their employment, the opposite may be true. The research also found that inefficiency appears to be top of mind for workers, as 78 percent of employees indicated that they regularly exchange ideas with colleagues on how to do their work more efficiently, but organizations often aren’t leveraging employee ideas. More than half (56 percent) of employees said their organization doesn’t incentivize them to find ways to be more efficient. Meanwhile, more than nine of 10 IT professionals recently surveyed by OnePoll for GoTo said they would consider the use of AI beneficial for work, with 94 percent saying they would be willing to delegate simple tasks to AI. About three quarters also would be willing to delegate even complex tasks to the technology. On average, IT workers believe delegating tasks to AI could save them more than two hours of work during any given workday, and 83 percent believe it would be easy for them to offload their simpler tasks to AI. The most commonly reported tasks IT teams are looking to offload to AI included monitoring network performance (44 percent), basic device troubleshooting (42 percent), and remediating basic problems (40 percent). AI security company Protect AI launched the Protect AI partner program, featuring foundational members such as World Wide Technologies (WWT), Forcespot and Ensign. The program offers dedicated tools and resources for reseller solution providers and channel distribution partners, helping them tap into the expanding market for securing enterprise AI systems and applications, said the company. The program is expected to help key resellers and channel companies empower their enterprise and government end customers to build, deploy and manage secure, trusted AI environments. It provides tools and strategies for continuous threat detection, proactive vulnerability management and robust response mechanisms for AI systems. “The need for AI security solutions is at an all-time high as enterprises deploy GenAI at scale,” said Ian Swanson, Protect AI’s CEO. “The Protect AI partner program provides partners with the resources and incentives needed to deliver safe, secure and trusted AI solutions, drive revenue and grow their businesses in the rapidly evolving field of secure and trusted AI.” The Protect AI partner program features three tiers, each tailored to a partner’s maturity and expertise in AI security. Partners gain access to a partner portal, with highlights including dedicated channel managers and solution engineers, and co-marketing and individualized training to build expertise in ML development and supply chain security, said the company. Protect AI has more than 60 partners in North America poised to join the program. Optiva, a provider of cloud-native billing, charging and revenue management software on private and public clouds, announced that its business support systems (BSS) platform and charging engine now incorporate agentic AI using advanced generative AI technology powered by Google’s Gemini models. While today’s chatbots are limited to queries and prompts, agentic AI has “agency,” with the ability to act autonomously and independently, adapt, complete complex tasks, make decisions and proactively achieve objectives, explained the company. Optiva’s agentic AI-powered BSS and virtual AI agents, integrated with the Optiva BSS Platform and Optiva Charging Engine, enable intelligent process automation, hyperpersonalized customer experiences and faster resolution times for communications service providers. By leveraging Google’s Gemini models, these AI agents enhance natural language understanding, proactive customer engagement and intelligent automation, reducing OPEX and accelerating time to market. Gemini models also power realtime insights using BigQuery and Looker, helping CSPs optimize and create innovative offerings, improve usage and billing transparency and drive new revenue streams. “We are not simply developing AI agents to streamline operations and improve customer experiences — we are establishing the foundation for a future where these agents can work together seamlessly,” said Chrisaman Sood, AI product strategist at Optiva. “This will create an intelligent, interconnected ecosystem that drives exponential value for telcos of the future.” Automation’s Efficiency Opportunity Protect AI Launches Partner Program to Protect AI Environments Optiva Launches Agentic AI for Telecom BSS AI & AUTOMATION 10 CHANNELVISION | MARCH - APRIL 2025
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=