BT Group’s AI Accelerator to cut down development time

BT Group has announced the deployment of a new internal Machine Learning Operations (ML-Ops) platform called AI Accelerator. 

According to the company, the new platform accelerates and monitors AI model deployments developed by BT Group’s data community, assessing their efficacy and behaviour to drive value from the business’ 29 petabyte data estate. 

The AI Accelerator will help to reduce the administrative and technical processes involved with taking a new AI use case from prototype to production. 

“A core driving principle for BT Group is to find a way to safely accelerate the time to value, pound per petabyte, of data. AI Accelerator gives us a path to more rapid value with clear oversight of AI use case parameters and performance,” says Adrian Joseph, Managing Director, Data & AI, for BT Group.

Ensuring an AI product or use case is fit for deployment

The new platform was built in partnership between BT's digital team, along with Datatonic, a leading data & AI consultancy and Google Cloud partner. BT and Google Cloud already have a relationship. Earlier this year, BT selected the cloud giant as its main partner driving to drive a company-wide digital transformation project.

The AI Accelerator will allow the Group to accelerate its build, measure, learn process for new AI use cases, including, for example, churn/propensity models, or to test models that personalise our apps and services for customers, delivering better customer experiences and/or value within our business units. 

In keeping with BT Group’s Responsible Tech principles, AI Accelerator has built-in triggers to make sure that new AI use cases are properly assessed in line with the company’s data privacy, security and ethics principles, ensuring the safe and responsible use of AI across the business.

According to BT Group, its combination of tech talent, partnerships and the technology contained within AI Accelerator will reduce the core of this process from 6 months in April 2022, to 6 days by March 2023. This acceleration is a result of the standardisation of tools and data handling, as well as streamlined software update and monitoring, drawn from the enhanced automation and templated best practices provided by AI Accelerator, and frees up months of time for every data scientist and analyst tasked with bringing new use cases to life across the Group.