Leveraging AI for asset and inventory optimisation

This chapter considers how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to optimise assets and inventory. It looks at how a business such as BT deals with the key resources that service organizations such as telecommunications companies maintain: their assets and inventories. In the discussion the authors address both strategic and operational dimensions of the deployment challenge for such companies. From a strategic perspective there is a need to deploy fixed assets for optimal performance; at the same time, from an operational perspective, there is a need to replenish inventory to be able to deliver services in line with customer service level agreements. This creates a ‘combinatorial optimization problem’ which, it is suggested, makes AI a useful technology for solving such problems for operational use.