- BT revealed it is working on an attractive new AI use case for emergency services
- But both BT and Uniti said it would be a huge pain to work through the API integration needed to run AI
- Arianza wants to help solve that problem, but there are still some questions about its approach
Navigating Salt Lake City, Utah 2025 – In the sea of network optimization tools and call center chatbots, what BT does with AI applications is really special. Well, at least something special enough to cheer us up in the final session of a packed meeting day.
Speaking on stage at the Alianza event, BT Enterprise Voice Director Ed Jakeman explained that the company uses AI to provide extended hearing capabilities for emergency service calls.
What does that mean? Well, when someone asks for help, it means that the AI can detect whether it hears an agonal breathing pattern that may indicate a cardiac event. This kind of information can help responders make decisions about how to prioritize incoming emergency calls. AI can also hear background noise to provide environmental context to responders when approaching an emergency.
“It's all about how you do your best to maintain your life and get all the information you need to get to emergency services,” Jakeman said.
BT is also considering applying AI to other emergency services use cases. For example, by responding to it, classifying calls that come to the non-emergency line, human dispatchers can stay free for more emergency calls.
“We've just started our journey with AI stuff with extended hearing and AI agents, so we're now in that piece,” he said.
AI integrated headache
According to Jakeman, getting these AI applications to work over a network is not a walk in the park. There are many plumbing that need to be done to integrate third-party components and models.
“All of our integration issues were where we had either a third-party application or an internal application we developed within BT, and then we had to try and match this new platform we're building,” he explained. “It slowed our progress. We didn't put out a new platform as fast as we wanted.”
Kurt Landgraf, VP of Network Architecture and Engineering at Uniti Group, said his team faces similar integration challenges as operators are building their own AI tools. He pointed out that Uniti uses AI to analyze network attributes, billing and customer data to provide forecast agent responses when customers make calls about issues.
However, he said the integration process to obtain such a working tool is a “nightmare.”
Arianza's angle
This is a problem that Alianza is trying to solve with the orchestration layer of the new intelligent communication fabric. Rather, as operators need to tackle the bear of the integration process individually, Alianza is pitching a future that bridges gaps with a single set of APIs that make it easier for both app developers and operators.
In fact, both Jakeman and Landgraf said that a single orchestration layer to do all this made their lives a lot easier. And less time spent on plumbing means more time can be spent on innovation.
Speaking to meeting attendees, Fierce discovered that there were several open questions among the customers about how the exact one works.
Is Apis Alianza open to the building? How easy is it to connect Alianza fabrics to other vendors' network solutions? If an operator chooses to build their own AI apps using these APIs, who owns the IP? Can operators like BT flip these apps to peers using Alianza fabrics?
These are all valid queries, but Arianza has time to answer. The company's CTO Dag Peak told Fierce that customers can use fabrics to develop applications “starting next year.” Initially, I was working on interworking elements in the media and signaling API, allowing me to “continue to lack in other elements over time.”
“We're accelerating some of the developing world right now. We're hiring a lot of engineers. It comes with acquisitions. There's an acquisition that deducts some of the ICF's capabilities. Next year we'll acquire a lot of baseline features and continue building and building,” he concluded.
