Before ChatGPT was even a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye, specialist companies were leveraging artificial intelligence in the forms of deep and machine learning, and developing practical solutions for their industry.
To most of us at the time, AI was a somewhat esoteric academic research subject. But one early adopter investing in the emerging technology was telecoms specialist AWTG, a company that had developed a platform users could give natural language voice commands to. After ongoing development to the present day, Kai from AWTG is available as a mature product, capable of multiple roles in different industries, from sales research to customer service.
But AWTG isn’t an AI startup, nor is it, specifically, an AI company. It’s all about the business of connectivity, IoT, and cellular networks, with customers from all over the world using its technology in a wide range of projects: rural connectivity to warehousing to campus-wide networks for large healthcare providers.
We spoke exclusively to Ian Vernon, the COO of the company, about the different sectors the company is active in and some of the underlying technology it deploys. It’s a business that drinks its own Kool-Aid, using AI in network operations as well as offering Kai for more public, customer-facing roles.
Before we delved into the details of the buzzword du jour that is AI, Ian gave us an illustration of the changes that can be brought about by a ‘simple’ 5G network provision – AWTG’s core business.
In Oxfordshire (England), the local authority commissioned AWTG to provide 5G connectivity to a rail line between Bletchley and Bicester. Although designed to allow passengers to stay connected along a route not well served by the big mobile operators, the network has positive impacts for the rural community through which the railway passes.
“Farms, rural business and homes can now start using connected IoT devices and sensors, via Fixed Wireless Access broadband connectivity. Farms can improve their yields. Everything starts with connectivity. There’s a lot of things IoT can do but without connectivity, you can’t use them. Farmers and businesses would have to spend money to build that network for themselves. But if the likes of Oxfordshire or Buckinghamshire can provide, instead of spending tens of thousands, I can pay, say, a thousand pounds a year to improve productivity on my farm.”
Similarly, a project beginning this year on the border between Scotland and England was originally designed to increase communications infrastructure to boost rural tourism. “When you start providing connectivity, you are able to monitor your environment better: when there’s going to be flooding, or when there’s a fire, or to monitor water quality for example,” Ian said. “Sensors in Lake Windermere could help prevent the dumping of waste into the lake, for example. When you have connectivity, you can do more.”
Business opportunities
Operational benefits from private 5G networks stem from providing highly-secure connections across any size facility up to large, campus-sized operations. Reliable and robust IoT networks improve productivity, and businesses can offer better experiences in the form of solid connectivity to their customers (students at a university, for example, or patients in a large hospital complex). Furthermore, the network owner can sell spare capacity to the public mobile operators so people roaming into the private network get a reliable connection in areas where their reception might normally be patchy.
The underlying technology is complex, and issues like load balancing, capacity provision and network traffic shaping are necessary behind the scenes. It’s at the network level where AWTG uses its experience in deep and machine learning to help manage the software and hardware, with AI making real-time decisions that ensure connectivity uptimes and QoS metrics remain high.
“Automation can now be inside the network with the use of innovations in Radio Access Network called RAN Intelligent Controller. We create machine learning algorithms that are inside the networks themselves, so the networks evolve. Back in the day of 3G and 4G, those capabilities did not exist. Now the world has changed a little bit in terms of AIs being accepted where they were traditionally not. It is the use of AI in things like traffic routing and hopping between masts, for instance, that has made a difference.”
For the operator of any network – LoRa, 5G, Wi-Fi – the benefits are dependent on the infrastructure and what smart networks are provisioned to solve. “A lot of the use cases have to do with power savings. In terms of power consumption on the user equipment or base station side is small, [but] on aggregate it’s large. That’s operational savings. And a big use of AI today is in quality for the network: how good is the service that you’re providing.”
From back-end to customer-facing
With its long experience in natural language processing (AWTG’s voice recognition systems pre-dated Amazon’s Alexa by a few years), the logical move was to transition the technology to the B2C market, Ian said.
“We took our AI knowledge, the command-and-control, decision-making and integrated that with large language models. So last year we released our AI platform, called Kai. It’s really more of a Copilot model – the main target is customer service. In our deployments like in the Borderlands [the project in the area between Scotland and England] it’s a combination. We have the network management AI, and the users have the Copilot-style AI that helps [them], the subscribers, to do more. We do everything in connectivity, from services to solutions.”
To find out more, head over to the company’s website.
Image source: AWTG
See also: IoT in 2025: Digital twins, mesh networks, VR, and more
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