NBN Co using AI to draft incident reports, prepare field crews

NBN Co is using artificial intelligence to prepare the “first cut” of post-incident reports and to better prepare crews to fix damaged infrastructure, amid a flurry of new use cases.

NBN Co CIO Rob Sewell, left, speaks at ServiceNow's World Forum 2026 in Sydney.

In a rare public appearance, chief information officer Rob Sewell took the stage at ServiceNow’s World Forum in Sydney on Thursday.

NBN Co’s AI ambitions - to incorporate the technology into its operations - are known, and the company indicated back in May that it is starting to do more with agentic AI.

But Sewell revealed that the “latest addition to [the company’s] AI toolset” is ServiceNow’s Now Assist, which includes both generative and agentic AI tools.

One of the first things the company built with Now Assist is an agent to produce draft post-incident reports (PIRs) for internal IT issues.

“An early use case [with Now Assist] was building a solution which would immediately do a first cut post-incident review after anything that happened in the IT space,” Sewell said.

He indicated that before incident information is passed to the agent, it is checked to remove anything potentially sensitive being processed by the agent, which could lead to it showing up in the PIR.

Sewell said that NBN Co is also doing a lot more with AI-based image analysis.

This includes “image analysis to identify when a new development is ready for NBN connection.”

“There’s always a very large number of those across the country,” he said.

Sewell also said that NBN Co is “looking at images to identify and make more efficient our process of remediating any damaged infrastructure.”

“We do these things tens of thousands of times across the country during a year, [so we’re] making it more efficient [and] making it faster, [which] is better for us and for customers.”

In the future, Sewell predicted AI would drive improvements in the company’s ability to serve its retail service providers, and through them, broadband customers across Australia.

“One phrase is ‘autonomous networks’, but really that means being able to better predict, detect [and] react to any changes that occur in the network across the country,” he said.

Sewell said that he is also looking for more AI-enabled efficiencies in the security and IT domains, which he oversees.

“My own team in security and IT are transforming the way we work,” he said.

Sewell said that a responsible AI policy underpins the company’s expanding list of AI use cases.

“The first thing we did [in going down the AI path] was make sure we actually had a really comprehensive responsible AI policy in place that reviews and manages every use case every time we deploy or use AI across the organisation,” he said.

While the company started on the AI path like many others, around personal productivity improvements, it had evolved to more impactful use cases in part by offering “targeted training across the organisation, deploying sandpit environments in which people could experiment and learn with tightly managed risk, [and] building guided assistance as we started to build more complex AI solutions in more powerful environments.”

Sewell said the AI drive aligns with one of five pillars of NBN Co’s organisational strategy, which is about being “simple and digital, making our company more insight-driven, more technology-enabled, [and] more efficient in the way that we actually deliver for our partners and customers and the country.”

“It’s an enterprise-wide shift,” he said.

“Every part of the company contributes and benefits as we really embed digital by default in the way we work, we embed data driven processes even more in everything we do, and we really use AI responsibly. 

“Our objective, obviously, is to make work easier, [and] to make service even better, not just to make it faster, so we simplify, then we digitise.”

Ry Crozier attended ServiceNow's World Forum Sydney as a guest of ServiceNow.