When a severe storm splintered poles carrying fiber in Northwest Arkansas and disrupted service for 600 OzarksGo broadband subscribers this spring, the cooperative responded almost instantly, thanks to a digital command center it built with artificial intelligence.

“It allowed us to be proactive rather than reactive, and that’s super important for restoring power and broadband in a timely manner,” said Chris Holloway, general manager of the broadband subsidiary of Fayetteville-based Ozarks Electric Cooperative.

“We’re able to communicate much more clearly and in a much more timely fashion to our customers on fiber outages than we have ever been. We’re able to be a lot more efficient with our resources as it pertains to restoration efforts.”

After the storm hit, the co-op focused on restoring service without having to dedicate hours to locating and processing impacted customers—key tasks that its broadband outage management system handled automatically.

That OMS is one of many advancements made possible by the internal enterprise management platform OzarksGo constructed in a matter of weeks using AI tools.

Holloway said the platform, dubbed Falcon, has fulfilled 80 of 188 projects identified so far for automation in engineering, operations, customer service and business development.

OzarksGo also anticipates significant savings from having a single platform compared to paying for multiple software and vendors. Falcon can manage and streamline the co-op’s entire restoration workflow in multiple ways, including:

• Determining whether a power outage or fiber issue caused the broadband disruption.
  
• Locating where fiber has been damaged, assigning field crews for the repair and tracking their progress in real time.
  
• Automatically notifying and updating affected customers.
  
• Detecting callers in an active outage for an accurate response.
  
• Publishing outage updates internally, externally and on social media.

That sort of technology is generally only available at large internet service providers, said Schylar Utley, project lead and director of engineering and operations at OzarksGo, which recently topped 47,000 subscribers.

“Falcon brings enterprise-level outage orchestration to a regional cooperative through a platform built exactly around our operations and workflows,” said Utley. “It becomes the central command center by replacing an ecosystem of disconnected processes and software. And it largely cost us next to nothing to build.”

OzarksGo staff began building the platform at the end of February and had an operational system by April 1—a job that ordinarily would take a crew of developers several years to complete and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The timing of Falcon was fortunate for the co-op’s broadband subscribers caught in that rare widespread outage in May.

Responding to the storm’s damage to 144 fibers, the co-op distinguished power-related broadband outages from fiber-only disruptions and sent the right crews to the right places quickly. Customer notifications also ran more efficiently, and the time spent on some engineering tasks dropped dramatically.

“That’s probably been the biggest revolutionary change for us: You no longer need to be a rockstar engineer to automate tasks,” said Utley.

“When it comes to determining who’s out, that’s a process that could take 30, 45 minutes for a GIS technician. Today that’s less than five seconds. We can instantly determine who’s out and create a mass outage alert for those people.”

AI aided development of the software, but the resulting systems and automations can run without it.

“We’re using AI to assist us in building software that runs our operations,” said Utley. “If AI disappeared today, all of our systems, all of the automations and all of the things that we’ve built would completely work.”

The AI-assisted platform will not replace co-op jobs, but it will reduce scores of work hours, Holloway said.

“It’s allowing all of our team members to be more efficient in automating repeatable tasks and letting them focus on more critical items that move our business forward,” he said.

OzarksGo is ready to help other co-ops seeking to build their own internal enterprise platforms.

“We can show you how many opportunities there are and how essentially simple it is with the right resources to develop something that is right for you and your members and your customers,” Holloway said.