AI Agents in Field Service - Part 1

I often get asked what are the top usecases in field service. I am planning to write about these in the news letters. As always, would love to hear your comments.

“From repairing a medical Imaging device to troubleshooting Wind Turbine, AI can optimize your field service operations.”? ?

Field service today goes beyond simply fixing problems—it is a continuous effort to enhance customer satisfaction and achieve profitable growth. Delivering exceptional field service requires a strategic focus across all aspects of operations. According to the 2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report (view the report here), 64% of employees struggle to find enough time to complete their work, making them 3.5 times more likely to have difficulty with innovation and strategic thinking.?

Field service organizations face significant challenges, including technician retention, the impact of an aging workforce, loss of critical internal tribal knowledge, and the need to efficiently manage break-fix tasks, installations, and preventative maintenance.?

The good news? Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer powerful solutions. AI applications can collaborate with human operators, remote experts, and onsite technicians to streamline tasks, boost efficiency, and increase job satisfaction.?

Essentially, AI coworkers can enable human counterparts to execute business processes and workflows in a consistent manner with speed without sacrificing quality and safety.?

Now is the perfect time to explore AI-driven innovations that can proactively prevent issues and transform field service operations for the better. Ascendo AI provides advanced AI agentic models and seamless integration with existing Field Service Management (FSM) workflows to address the entire field service lifecycle. Start your journey to smarter, more efficient field service today.??

Responding to Failure Alert? - Resolution AI Agent

Any break fix such as a telecom provider seeing network down or energy operator seeing sudden turbine failure alarms or an ultrasound machine display is grainy, starts with a system generated alert or a customer complaint. Only a subset of defined problems can be auto fixed with no or limited human intervention. When such issues surface, support teams rush and scrimmage to find a solution.?

The Challenge:?

Often, such service calls are assigned based on availability and technicians head out with limited information beyond the issue description or fault codes. In some situations, for example, medical facilities may have onsite biomed that can perform some work however, they may not be armed with most appropriate solutions that could work. They just need to go by what they learnt and often are forced to perform more work (like more parts) than needed.? They are forced to work with any level of expertise available at the customer site. For example, Dialysis centers may be able to take care of some of the problems with some remote assistance.? The other option is to have a field technician dispatched to the site to fix the problem.????

The Solution?

Self Service: Ascendo’s AI teammate can provide immediate help to the customers to get guided help and resolution. Such solutions would be based on knowledgebase across manuals, troubleshooting guides, FAQs, and other approved service bulletins.? Ascendo AI agents can be search or conversational teammates that can provide help through any channel like knowledge portal, support portal, within field service application, forums, community, etc.,??

Dispatch Managers: With the Ascendo AI’s generative AI capabilities, dispatch managers can assign the work order with a clear step including any safety guides. With the integration with FSM and ERP software, Ascendo AI can also help check the part inventory and provide options to take the part prior to visiting the customer site.? Based on the process requirements, Ascendo AI can help automate creating the dispatch orders.???

Field Engineers: Field technicians going to the field with limited information can be avoided through Ascendo AI’s automatic creation of a clear game plan.? Ascendo AI uses prior activities, prior resolutions, internal knowledge articles, documentations, training videos, service bulletins, and other documentation to clearly formulate action steps that a technician needs to take including recommendation on parts.?

Service Leaders: It is always better to predict and to prevent issues.? Here again, Ascendo AI’s Top Driver AI Agent can detect prevalent issues through its advanced clustering model and provide the ability to draft either a focused knowledge article or help remote experts develop automatic fixes.? Once they become available, Ascendo AI can even detect and execute such fixes either automatically or with human approvals.?

Training Managers: How can this response be taken into training and how can this be augmented with real life experience so training and onboarding time is not just significantly reduced upfront, but continue to be reduced and up-to-date without the need to create new manual knowledge.

A point solution (like showing knowledge by converting manuals) can only address a small portion of the business workflow and needs professional services and many days / hours of onboarding. Only when every use case when looked in its entirety can scale to execute workflows that point solutions will never be able to.

Ramki Pitchuiyer and Team Ascendo AI , Thank you for bringing in your knowledge on Field Service to make our products better every day to make a difference for our customers.

Keep your comments coming....