As remote work exploded, Comcast turned to AI to keep the internet running

These kinds of mysteries used to require a lot of foresight and engineering work to deal with. But now, Comcast says it can use artificial intelligence to solve similar problems automatically. Prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, the company developed an AI system called Octave that can detect network anomalies and figure out how to address them. "It's not just automating what smart engineers can do. It's going to places where they just couldn't process that amount of information and come up with solutions quick enough to do what [Octave] does," says Tony Werner, Comcast's president of technology, product, and "Xperience."