Interactive customers win, as AI expands into service operations

Interactive has moved AI beyond personal productivity pilots and into core managed services, using the technology to triage about 40,000 device alerts a year while preparing deeper agent-led diagnostics for its cloud business.

Lizzy Jones, head of Data & AI at Interactive, leads the company's Data & AI practice and has 30 years' experience spanning digital transformation, enterprise applications, data and analytics, customer experience and technology delivery.

Core operations

Interactive divides its AI work into two broad areas. The first covers low-code and no-code tools, Copilot-style personal productivity and agents built around individual roles. The second focuses on enterprise-wide use cases tied directly to operational workloads.

Its cloud business is one example. Interactive monitors thousands of devices and receives about 40,000 alerts from them each year. Previously, a person had to review every alert and log it in the IT service management system. AI now triages each alert, automatically creates a ticket and provides an initial diagnostic assessment, including three suggested next actions.

The next step will be deeper triage, with an agent sent to a device to run diagnostics and return more detailed results. Interactive is deliberately rolling out the capability in stages.

That approach is also raising questions about who should own AI systems once they are built. One unresolved issue is whether maintenance should sit with the technology function or remain with the business team using an agent, particularly when someone must remain accountable for the accuracy of its outputs.

The same question is emerging among Interactive's customers as organisations consider how roles and operating models may change as agents become more widely used.

Data controls

"I think air gapping is a fantastic use case. You can have a very high-spec laptop with your own local models to run your AI use cases on, and you don't have to get into the tokenomics of the thing, and it protects your data at the same time," said Lizzy Jones, head of Data & AI, Interactive.

Interactive has deliberately avoided a blanket ban on external AI tools, despite steering employees towards Copilot in its Microsoft environment. Instead, its controls focus on data loss prevention, classification and labelling, particularly for the organisation's most sensitive information.

The business can see when employees access external AI tools through a browser. The greater concern is not whether staff use another model, but whether sensitive corporate information is entered into a service that has not been approved for that data.

Shadow AI is treated as a persistent part of the technology environment rather than something that can be eliminated by blocking applications. Controlled experimentation can also surface useful ideas, including tools first tried at home that could later be developed into enterprise-grade applications.

Controls are tighter in customer work. Interactive may use AI to synthesise information or summarise reports, but it does not use customer-facing autonomous agents. A human remains in the loop, while meetings recorded and transcribed for AI-generated summaries are handled with customer consent and transparency.

"We're not creating models. I think the next iteration for us will be like a domain-specific language model, where maybe we leverage our own IP to stay on top. But that's more your context and that type of thing. I don't know if we'll create an Interactive LLM or we'll store one locally and then put our own context over the top," added Jones.

Skills pipeline

Interactive does not see a broad shortage of technology staff as its main workforce constraint, although newer skills can be harder to recruit. It places greater emphasis on transferable skills and cross-skilling than on expecting candidates to arrive with every capability required for a role.

The cyber business Interactive acquired in 2023 runs a graduate training programme that recruits people directly from university and develops them early in their careers. Many participants are retained after graduation, giving the business a pipeline of internally trained staff rather than relying solely on experienced hires.

Interactive takes a similar approach to AI adoption. It identifies employees who are enthusiastic about the technology, even if they are not advanced users, and encourages them to demonstrate practical applications to colleagues.

Company-wide AI playground sessions still run every two weeks. Interactive also uses guides and regular internal discussions to make adoption more deliberate, rather than leaving staff with an open-ended instruction to experiment on their own.

Some experienced technology staff who were sceptical about AI 12 months earlier have since become regular users, making internal champions an important part of adoption alongside formal technology controls.

Measuring value

Interactive is still refining how it measures AI's value once basic adoption has been established. Early measures have included prompt volumes, adoption data and estimated hours saved in Microsoft's environment. Those figures, however, do not show how employees or managers use the time released.

The focus is therefore shifting from whether employees use AI to whether time savings translate into higher-value work or other measurable business outcomes. Interactive expects the metrics it tracks to evolve as adoption matures.

The business also operates an internal ideas hub that guides proposals through a requirements-capture process before placing them on a board where employees can vote. The system is designed to surface use cases that sit beyond the tools or capabilities an individual employee can build alone. Ideas can also originate from customer needs.

Interactive is also considering whether productivity gains made internally can flow through to customers through its services. The question is whether improvements to internal operations can ultimately translate into benefits for customers.

"The best ideas are the groundswell. They're not from executives," added Jones.