23-06-2025
Generative AI's Benefit Extends Well Beyond The Office
Generative AI is providing significant benefits for workers in the field, especially for organizations like SA Power Networks, the sole electricity distributor in South Australia. getty
By Maarten Rikken, SAP
There are bold predictions about the impact of generative AI: that it's set to affect almost 40% of global jobs and increase global GDP by $7 trillion. The predictions tend to focus on knowledge workers, so it can be easy to forget that generative AI's impact is being felt by operational and frontline workers, too.
This isn't to say generative AI's benefits for knowledge workers aren't compelling. It's already eliminating repetitive tasks and increasing efficiency. The thing is, it's also providing significant benefits for workers in the field, especially for organizations like SA Power Networks, the sole electricity distributor in South Australia.
South Australia is a large state, and SA Power Networks' service technicians must maintain electricity poles and infrastructure across a vast space, including in rural and metropolitan areas. Field technicians often need information, such as the pole's installation date, known hazards, voltage, and circuit diagrams, to do their jobs.
"When our crews are out there looking at a pole in a storm, for example, they need information about what has happened in the past," says Jason Anthony, Head of Enterprise Applications, SA Power Networks. "The difficulty is bringing that information to a person who's in a raised work platform 10 meters off the ground." Find out how to build custom AI applications with AI for SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)
To get that information into the hands of their crews, SA Power Networks built a custom generative AI application that lets them search through relevant information with natural language. Ways generative AI benefits the field
There are a few generative AI qualities that stand out for SA Power Networks' field technicians. Gen AI is accessible and excellent at quickly sifting through vast amounts of data to provide relevant information. This accelerates research and gets service technicians the answers they need to do their jobs. When you combine this incredible analytical ability with accessibility, we see what makes Gen AI so attractive to people in the field.
"Gen AI has allowed us to put 50 years of information into the hands of our field technicians with a simple query, either through natural language or presenting it based on contextual information," says Matt Pritchard, Head of Architecture and Data, SA Power Networks.
Natural language interfaces (NFIs) let people interact in a way that feels natural, through spoken or written language, without learning specific commands or navigating complex systems. When leveraged in customer service, they often result in more self-service use and fewer interactions, which improves both the customer and employee experience.
SA Power Networks' need to analyze 50 years of data also speaks to generative AI's scalability and customization. Building a generative AI app for your business can offer big benefits. Once you know what you want the app to do—analyze data or improve customer service, for example—you'll need to select the model you want to train and gather the data to train it. Then, it's a case of building an interface for users to interact with.
Custom applications let you offer a personalized user experience. Because the model is trained on a specific dataset relevant to your business processes, it will generally offer significantly better performance and accuracy. Additionally, as your business needs evolve, you can easily update and retrain your model to adapt to new data and challenges.
"Gen AI has been a game changer for us, in terms of serving information in a fast and meaningful manner," says Pritchard. "By building custom applications that use Gen AI, we can put information in the hands of our field crews, who really just want to do their jobs as quickly and as safely as possible." Getting the most out of Gen AI
Organizations like SA Power Networks show that the impact of Gen AI is broad-reaching when applied correctly, especially when building custom applications. Tailored AI applications let organizations generate highly accurate and contextual results built with the audience in mind. For SA Power Networks, this was making historical information accessible to field technicians through natural language.
Find out how to build custom AI applications with AI for SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)
