Origin Energy has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to enhance its network team’s capabilities. The team has automated many processes that used to involve paper forms, Excel spreadsheets, command line interfaces, and manual configuration changes.
Oliver Oldham, the head of networks and core infrastructure services, said that this has reduced the time spent on ‘housekeeping’ activities and increased the focus on more valuable and strategic work.
The team has also developed AI to integrate into low-level tasks around service optimisation. Oldham said that this has eliminated many errors and incidents that affected the network services and the network operations team. He said that this has improved the efficiency, the stakeholder satisfaction, and the end user experience.
The program has coded many end-to-end network change processes into software and delivered them through a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Oldham said that this has simplified the change process and removed the complexities that arose from having multiple individuals involved.
He said that this has reduced the network change failures from a third to less than five percent.
Network changes are tested and deployed in known configuration state. Network environment becomes more stable and efficient.