Give Employees and Customers the Network Experience They Deserve

Today’s CEOs have three top priorities for their CIOs: improve the customer experience, strengthen IT and business collaboration, and improve the employee experience, according to the Foundry 2023 State of the CIO.

There’s certainly room for improvement: 80% of respondents to a Juniper Networks survey said poor network connectivity interrupts their work, on average, two to three times per day.

The connectivity issue has multiple costs, including reduced productivity and increased employee frustration. Furthermore, network disruption can impact customer interactions — threatening revenues and competitive advantage.

Time to get proactive

To reduce connectivity problems, network services must deliver high availability and performance while also supplying agility for flexible demand. That can be challenging considering that IT teams today are often overstretched with the management of countless devices and applications traversing the network, as well as ensuring security amid today’s complex cyber-threat landscape.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies — such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) — are easing these tasks, while also delivering network speed, greater operational efficiencies, and other benefits. For example, NLP has been a significant force behind virtual network assistants, which can combine data inputs and syntax such as root causes to predictively identify network issues and offer actionable insights for remediation.

The AI-driven network prioritizes and routes traffic. For example, these capabilities can help ensure the right apps are immediately available to the right users and that video calls don’t lag or drop. In addition, AI technology proactively watches for any network degradation to avoid issues that may cause business disruption – and employee or customer frustration.

Wi-Fi gets an AI-driven network boost

A large restaurant chain was encountering some network degradation issues that made it difficult to keep pace with business growth. The company wanted to improve the user experience – including the provision of robust Wi-Fi connectivity both inside and outside their stores.

They chose to deploy Juniper’s Mist AI solution, which combines AI, ML, and data science techniques to optimize user experiences. Making it doubly challenging, they launched it into a store at one of the busiest times of the year: Thanksgiving. Within three days of deployment, the system was running flawlessly, said their principal network architect.

That initial project quickly rolled into a five-store pilot, which ran just as smoothly as the initial launch.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the network architect. “As a network engineer, you only ever hear about problems. No one ever tells you: ‘Hey, the Wi-Fi is working great.’” With the Juniper Mist AI deployment, he said store operators and end users called the network team to say, “thanks for investing in the network.”

“With Juniper’s AI and advanced API capabilities, we’ve been able to leverage automations and integrations that have significantly reduced our Wi-Fi-related incidents,” he added. “Mist AI gets us out of the repetitive, day-to-day troubleshooting tasks and allows our business to focus more resources on strategic initiatives and serving our customers.”

Transform your network with AI. Learn more about Juniper Mist AI here.