LIVE FROM TM FORUM DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WORLD, COPENHAGEN: Harmeen Mehta, chief digital and innovation officer at BT Group (pictured) insisted the industry is truly at the tipping point of the AI revolution, as she opened up on the company’s goal of unlocking more than £1 billion in value from the technology.

Mehta told the keynote audience as a former student of computer science, specifically of neural networks and AI, she had been waiting “two and a half decades to see this decade” and it was a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment for the industry.

She pointed to a partnership kicked-off less than two years ago with Google to move all of BT’s data to the public cloud, a process which is now 75 per cent completed, as one of the most valuable decisions it could have made to shape the next decade.

Mehta said by consolidating fragmented data across 2,500 systems into one place it had found a very real monetisation opportunity.

To that end, Mehta said her team had already promised the wider organisation around half a billion pounds of value it wanted to create from data and AI, “but what we see in-front of us is an opportunity for another billion”.

She provided a few use cases to achieve these lofty goals. These include moves to lay fibre more intelligently through an AI-powered application, and putting AI at the centre of customer care by intelligently pairing the most appropiate agents to deal with certain queries to reduce churn.

Assessing the future AI opportunity, Mehta insisted a change in culture was needed for the technology to thrive.

“This is the true test for technologists and for business people. For the first time, technology is speaking the human language. So, it’s very easy to understand. It’s no longer rocket science,” she said. “This is also the first time that technology is disrupting technology.”