It is believed that with massive quantities of data, businesses will have the potential to establish

a new era of fact-based innovations, backing up new ideas supported by solid evidence (10
Steps to Creating a Data-Driven Culture, 2021). Data analysis has been reviewed with growing
importance in the current high-tech society, and it is important and necessary for corporations
to take the data analysis as part of the company culture. The appearance machine learning and
AI brings a lot of convenience for business to start the data analysis, and it also identifies the
underlying dependency from the organizations to use data analysis to understand the industry
trend and strategy review. The strategy of making more decisions and business strategies based
on the outcome of data analysis, not only notes the importance of data analysis in the business
culture, but also gives evidence to the market understanding and maintain close relationship
with the market feedback.

This report is going to discuss AT&T, a company that “has been changing the way people live,
work and play for more than 140 years” (AT&T Corporate Profile, n.d.), use of data analytics
and AI, and how that helps the business to grow and maintain its leading position in the
industry. Firstly, it will briefly describe the business and its experience with data analysis and AI
implementation. Secondly, the report will discuss how the implementation of the emerging
technologies in the business has helped AT&T to make better business decisions and product
offerings. In the end, it will discuss how the business should react to the Industrial Revolution
4.0 and what innovation ideas they can take to maintain its leading position and grow the
business to the next level.

AT&T was founded 144 years ago and keeps reinvesting itself multiple times to utilize the
historic groundbreaking innovations, including the transistor, the communication satellite, and
more lately, the solar cell (deloitteeditor, 2021). The key areas of the business’s market focus
are 5G, AT&T Fiber and HBO Max. The organization focuses on delivering to their customers
with “connectivity, technology, entertainment, news, advertising and more” (AT&T Corporate
Profile, n.d.). AT&T has begun its cultural transformation since 2018, which focuses on the
introduction of data-driven change management that is adaptable to the requests from the
individual departments and people in the business, and it is also efficient enough to combine
those separate elements.

Despite that AT&T formed partnership with third party to form a team to initialize the data-
drive change and process, the organization kept it in mind that the only method to ensure the
advanced analytics initiatives to succeed, is to maintain “one version of the truth” organization-
wide (Telco Transformation - For AT&T, Cultural Transformation Begets Digital Data
Transformation, n.d.). And this centralized data team can set the tone for the entire business,
give definition to the toolsets, provide the recommendations, and do the tasks with agility.

Nowadays, with the emerging of automation intelligence and machine learning, AT&T starts the
plan to implement ML and AI to re-design the process it collects, operates, and use data. One
major part of the tasks that business is doing is to automate the routine cleansing and
aggregation jobs that data analysts must work on, so the automation can save more extra time
for them to concentrate on more revolutionary tasks. The organization wants to find a place
where can support democratic accessible data available but still align with privacy, security, and
other data related regulations, ensuring that the data analysis outcome is more broadly
available to qualified individuals among the entire business. The target of this final data
dashboard or visualization method can federate the data across business verticals, perform
centralized management and governance, and still align with guidelines that can still promise
speed and agility. The new implemented technologies have shortened the lifecycle which
market requires to work from prototype to full-scale production for ML models. These models
have had dramatic results, such as blocking 6.5 billion robocalls to customers, deterring fraud in
AT&T stores, and making technician visits to customer homes more efficient.

More than the above, AT&T also focuses on listening to the clients and use Artificial Intelligence
and Machine Learning to anticipate customer needs which is to find out issues before the
customer tells. There are four key pillars in the business’s transformation plan, in other words,
to build its transformational DNA, the four key pillars, People, Process, Technology and Culture,
are critical to build up the solution. As identified in AT&T’s blog (AT&T Business Transformation
Pillars, n.d.), the four pillars are defined as the followings:

People – Restructuring roles to be customer-centric and taking full advantage of process

re-engineering and technology innovations.
Process – Always looking to eliminate redundancy, so we’re building strong process re-
engineering and re-architecture disciplines.
Technology -- Deploying the full arsenal. From RPA solutions on one end, to SaaS-based
solutions on the other and everything else in between.
Culture – Breaking down silos, enabling borderless collaboration, continuous learning
and of course it all centered on the customer.

The organization believes that improving employee experiences is just as crucial as effortless
customer experience. The plan taken by AT&T is also effective in other businesses, as data-
driven transformation has been a hot topic under the Industry Revolution 4.0.

Industry Revolution 4.0 involves the technologies that help grow “automation, machine-to-
machine communication, manufacturing oversite, and decision making” (Moran, 2021).
Productivity and efficiency are improved a lot, while the technologies also grow the flexibility,
agility, and profitability. A big part of the improvement is to enable a higher ability to harvest
the data, which relies a lot on the appearance of sensors, aggregators, cloud computing, and
other internet things (Mansoor, 2021).

With the above-mentioned technologies, the fourth revolution brings better efficiency to the
data analytics. The appearance of automation fastens and makes the data collection easier. And
it creates a greater visibility and throughput for operations, which enables the businesses to
deliver more value to customers to grow the business (Immerman, 2021).

It can already be witnessed in the AT&T that Industry Revolution 4.0 has been effectively
implemented in the business. In addition to its growth in business, AT&T also earned other
benefits from this implementation, that the business units are getting more knowledgeable
about data analysis and are figuring out more places that data analysis can be used. And the
whole business is asking for much more mature and innovated data to work on.

AT&T suggests that business should start considering what they should offer in order to keep
and attract more talented resources for the new technology fields. From human resource side,
business will be encouraged to have more training resources. And taking the organization, it is
important for the company to start creating a data driven culture and understand how the data
generated by methods in industry revolution 4.0 can help business grow. The 4.0 and the
emphasize on data is not just an operation changes, but also a vision for innovating and
managing technologies with an idea of launching a “more empowering, collaborative, and
sustainable foundation for social and economic development” (The Fourth Industrial Revolution
| Essay by Klaus Schwab, n.d.). The benefits of this vision will in the end be the main challenge
and huge responsibility for the next 50 years. The mapping of stakeholders can help business to
decide strategy on different dimension based on the different interest and influence and help
manage resource efficiently. And stakeholders’ engagement can get executive buy-in from the
leadership team, which means that the importance of data analysis is confirmed from the
higher level.

Despite that the transformation process began long ahead of the COVID-19 situation, the
framework and established systems do bring an advanced step in the industry for AT&T. While
in the pandemic that customers go to the business for help and stability, AT&T tries to use the
new technology and methodology to provide solution and get aligned with the new lifestyle.
Thanks to the benefit of this type of centralized and dedicated digital transformation through
cultural transformation, data analytics initiatives have successfully helped AT&T expand and
integrate its supply chain and business lifecycle.
Reference:
10 Steps to Creating a Data-Driven Culture. (2021, November 30). Harvard Business Review.
Retrieved February 18, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2020/02/10-steps-to-creating-a-data-driven-
culture

AT&T Business Transformation Pillars. (n.d.). AT&T. Retrieved February 18, 2022, from
https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2020/07/leading_with_listening.html

AT&T Corporate Profile. (n.d.). AT&T. Retrieved February 18, 2022, from
https://about.att.com/pages/corporate_profile

deloitteeditor. (2021, March 3). At AT&T, Adventures in Data Democracy. WSJ. Retrieved
February 18, 2022, from https://deloitte.wsj.com/articles/at-at-t-adventures-in-data-
democracy-01614801730

Immerman, G. (2021, January 20). Industry 4.0 Advantages and Disadvantages.

MachineMetrics. Retrieved February 4, 2022,
from https://www.machinemetrics.com/blog/industry-4-0-advantages-and-disadvantages\ 

Mansoor, Z. (2021, June 15). The role of data analytics in industry 4.0. Gulf Business. Retrieved
February 4, 2022, from https://gulfbusiness.com/the-role-of-data-analytics-in-industry-4-0/   

Moran, K. (2021, October 15). Benefits of Industry 4.0. SL Controls. Retrieved February 4, 2022,
from https://slcontrols.com/en/benefits-of-industry-4-0/#:%7E:text=The%20benefits%20of
%20Industry%204.0,also%20improves%20the%20customer%20experience

Telco Transformation - For AT&T, Cultural Transformation Begets Digital Data Transformation.
(n.d.). Telco Transformation. Retrieved February 18, 2022, from
http://www.telcotransformation.com/author.asp?section_id=433&doc_id=732302

The Fourth Industrial Revolution | Essay by Klaus Schwab. (n.d.). Encyclopedia Britannica.
Retrieved February 6, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Fourth-Industrial-
Revolution-2119734