LETTER FROM THE AMERICAS
responding to service issues. “We’re able to answer questions the way network documents are written,” said Brady Volpe, Chief Product Officer at OpenVault. “We’re pulling information from those documents.” Pleased with the response to his initial offering, OpenVault has just introduced a second-generation AI-oriented product called Vantage PNM. This tool relies on telemetry to help operators detect and repair imminent and emerging network issues. “Historically, cable operators have been firefighting organisations,” Volpe noted. “AI can identify where the worst fires are,” as well as help detect the early signs of trouble and prevent future fires. Even the smallest Tier III operators are looking to leverage AI. To meet this demand, the National Content & Technology Cooperative (NCTC) is looking at creating an “AI Center of Excellence” to arm its 700 U.S. and Canadian members with information about business and use cases for the technology. Speaking at the group’s summer conference in Salt Lake City, Utah last August, NCTC CEO Lou Borrelli said he expects to complete the development phase and bring the matter to the group’s board early this year. If the proposed centre gets the green light, he said, NCTC members will gain access to affordable, easy-to-deploy AI technology. “We’re very confident in the progress we’re making,” Borrelli told Light Reading. “We all know that AI is coming…. We want to make sure our members have access to whatever they need going forward.” Cable technologists expect to see much more AI development progress over the next few years. “To be honest, we’re in the early days on that,” Sucharczuk said. “There’s a lot of processing power left to augment what they do in the edge.” While the potential benefits of AI and related technologies are many, there are also some major potential risks, as hinted at earlier. What could go wrong? Plenty. For one thing, operators could deploy AI without carefully vetting the technology and weighing what they want to achieve and how they aim to leverage it.
“It has to be the right kind of AI,” Madiedo emphasised. “We’re not doing AI because it’s fun to do AI… It has to be something useful. It has to make sense.” For another, operators must clean up all the messy network and customer data they have collected before feeding that to their AI engines. Otherwise, they could end up making things worse rather than better. “That’s key,” Madiedo said. “Our deployments have succeeded because over the years we have done our homework.” Third, cable technologists must ensure they have upper management support for their transformation efforts. Without that crucial support, their efforts are bound to falter. Moreover, operators must create strong guardrails when deploying AI to make sure things don’t go awry. For this reason, Bastian calls AI a “double-edged sword.” He noted that “with AI assuming such a major role in network performance, when it fails (because it is far from perfect), the results could be much more widespread.” While some industry technologists worry about the risks that AI poses, others fret that the industry will not deploy the technology quickly enough to stay ahead of, or at least keep up with, the competition. They urge operators to put their foot on the gas rather than tap on the brakes. “Honestly, my biggest fear is that cable companies don’t go fast enough,” Rob Wilmoth concluded. “Look before you leap but don’t look too long before you lose the opportunity to leap.” My biggest fear is that cable companies don’t go fast enough. Look before you leap but don’t look too long before you lose the opportunity to leap.”
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MARCH 2026 Volume 48 No.1
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