Industries across the world have an interest in working with startups and scaleups for a variety of reasons. Younger companies setting out to improve or revolutionize ecosystems bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas and disruptive technologies that can help established corporations stay competitive, adapt to changing markets and drive innovation within their own organizations. Additionally, newer companies are typically more agile and flexible than larger corporations, allowing them to respond quickly to changes in the market, which can be a huge asset when partnering with our industry.

As the head of Technology Outreach at CableLabs, I am constantly on the hunt for emerging tech companies around the globe that are looking to create change in the connectivity landscape. My mission is to build meaningful bridges between our Technology Vision for the industry, our member operators and external tech communities.

Whether your interest is in partnership, investing, acquisition, trend-watching or deeper collaboration, the companies I will spotlight in this two-part blog series are sure to spark your interest.

This fall, I hosted a session called neXus: New Partner Showcase in person at SCTE TechExpo in Atlanta and virtually to my UpRamp Community. The session highlighted the intersection of new partner technology and our member operators’ offerings. The startups and scaleups I featured have the potential to drive growth, innovation and transformation in our industry.

• Mediacom joined the stage with Aispire to discuss how they are unlocking the power of customer and network data to build a foundation for AI/ML applications.
• Frontline worker AI company Anthill highlighted how they help use AI with company data through a no-code platform built for non-technical experts, elevating the work of humans for the AI era.

Aispire.ai and Mediacom

Like many operators, Mediacom has challenges with siloed tools and data. While effective individually, their tools are focused on specific aspects of the network, making it difficult to see the bigger picture.

This is where Mediacom’s partnership with Aispire.ai comes in, providing a comprehensive solution that integrates all these tools and data into a cohesive system. Aispire's Network Intelligence Suite offers network-wide visibility, from individual subscribers to the entire network, using standard protocols. The system is non-invasive and can be added to any operator network. The first goal is to gather data (flow, BGP, SNMP, DNS, operator tags) and correlate it to provide insights and perspectives. From there, Aispire can apply analytics including AI/ML workloads for deep analysis.

The key features and use cases:

• Subscriber Insights understands consumption by subscriber grouping, service and where that traffic is entering the network from a peering perspective. For example, during a recent Peacock TV live-streaming event, Aispire’s tools helped Mediacom track and analyze the data with ease and speed, providing a comprehensive view of the network's performance in near real time.
• Peering Insights pulls data from peering routers and correlates it on a per-router, per-peer basis. This helps Mediacom understand traffic patterns and consumption, and even identify issues like unusual drops and spikes on specific routers, individual peers or overall on a service-by-service basis. It also identified target equipment where engineers were able to narrow to an IOS issue. Peering Insights helps operators quickly see what is entering the network from a free or paid perspective and if free peering is taking a more costly route, reducing OpEx.
• Security Insights provides visibility into traffic entering the network and allows for ad hoc reporting on any layer 3 or layer 4 conversation, including being able to identify subscribers involved in residential proxy events.
• Video Insights helps Mediacom with their IPTV rollout by analyzing bandwidth usage and predicting future needs, ensuring that all customers have the same experience.
• Performance Insights finally answers the questions: Is it the customer's problem? The content provider’s problem? Our problem?

Overall, the partnership between Mediacom and Aispire integrates and correlates data from various sources to provide a comprehensive view of the network. This enables Mediacom to address current challenges and prepare for future AI/ML workloads, ultimately identifying performance issues before they impact customers and improving network performance.

The best part? This work paves the way for an incredibly improved customer experience, churn reduction and the customer centricity of the platform maximizes the customer lifetime value. It’s a win-win-win.

To learn more, visit www.aispire.ai or email evan.davis@aispire.ai.

Anthill.co

Anthill is an automation platform designed for the frontline workforce to simplify recruiting, onboarding, training and retention. I met the co-founder, Muriel Clauson-Closs, when I attended Singularity University last April. She gave a talk on the future of work that blew me away. For example, did you know that deskless professions make up over 80 percent of the current workforce and that it is overrepresented by workers over 55? This struck me as I know some of our operators are struggling with losing some of their best talent in the field due to retirements.

Muriel really challenged everyone there on whether we are asking the right questions about AI in the workforce.

Muriel is from Alaska and, growing up, most of the people she knew were working in frontline jobs and out in the field. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we all realized the critical role these workers play, something that Muriel had known for years due to the Ph.D. work she had been doing in this space. She identified an unmet need in the technology advances that knowledge workers get but saw that the frontline workers were being left out. And this is how Anthill was created.

Muriel pointed out a significant population shift expected by 2030, with a projected addition of 12 million new jobs in the United States — but only 1.4 million people available to fill them. This shortage is compounded by the rapid change in required skills due to advancements in AI. Anthill helps organizations manage this by scaling best practices in workforce management through automation.

Anthill's platform offers five key benefits:

• Efficient management of the frontline workforce
• Hiring and managing non-English speakers
• Increasing retention rates
• Improving safety and compliance
• Gaining insights from frontline interactions

The platform is built with responsible AI, ensuring data safety and human-in-the-loop review, making it accessible even to non-technologists.

And, as I mentioned above, very relevant to the problems we are seeing with some of our operators, Muriel also shared how Anthill supports companies with an aging field operations workforce. Many industries face this challenge, with the average age of field workers being 56. Anthill's workflow automations include exit interviews to capture valuable experience and knowledge from departing employees. This data is then used to create training content for new workers, providing them with a virtual expert to consult in real time.

Additionally, Anthill adapts to the needs of Gen Z workers, who expect more communication and answers to their questions, by implementing supportive automations.

Anthill's impact is evident in its work with call centers, where they have seen more than 10 percent improved retention rates and reduced management staffing needs by 10 times. They are now looking to partner with the broadband industry to bring these benefits to a new sector.

You can learn more at www.anthill.co and get in touch with them at partnership@anthill.co.

I will be featuring the remaining companies in another blog post this week. Come back to learn about what Vodafone Germany is doing with FlyNex and Dimetor with commercial drone flights and what Charter has cooked up with Bug Labs as part of their Network as a Service (NaaS) deployment.

If you’re an operator working with or investing in an interesting startup, scaleup or a new company from adjacent ecosystems, I would love to hear from you. Please contact me using the button below.