How business can use IoT to conduct more efficient operations

Chris Penrose, President of IoT at AT&T, spoke with TechRepublic’s Macy Bayern at the 2018 AT&T Business Summit about how IoT can benefit organizations. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Chris Penrose: Well, IoT really can transform almost any part of the business. In fact, AT&T is using IoT across a number of parts of our business, so I think it’s a good place to give examples. If you think about our fleet is all connected, so we’re actually able to effectively monitor and dispatch our technicians across the entire country and do that to save gas and also do real time maintenance on our vehicles. A great use case.

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We’re connecting all of our generators, so think about deployments in emergency response situations. We put a lot of assets out there, but where are they actually located, how can you go reclaim them, as well as when do they need to be refueled in real time? That’s another great use case. We’re using drones to actually do tower inspections right now at AT&T, so instead of climbing our towers we’re flying drones up using a camera solution to be able to capture that imagery and avoid a tower climb if we don’t need to.

Really, I mean, everything can be connected. I think what you need to be thinking about is how can I either drive more efficiencies in my business, drive out costs, how can I drive new revenue streams by connecting something that hasn’t been connected, or how can I create a new customer experience?

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