Bringing Intelligence to Infrastructure
I live in the mountains and we get our water from a well. Not a crank-the-handle and haul-up-the-bucket kind of well, no, it’s a modern well system, but the water still comes from deep underground. There’s a submersible pump sitting 650 feet down the well casing that pumps water up the pipe, through a 3-stage filtration system, and into both a 500-gallon cistern that feeds a pressure tank and a 14-zone closed-loop hydronic system for in-floor heating. All of this in my mechanical room and it’s all very impressive. But when something goes wrong, “impressive” suddenly looks a lot more like “overwhelmingly complicated”.
Early one Sunday morning my wife heard a faint but persistent beeping coming from the basement. I got up and followed the sound to the mechanical room. After some searching, I narrowed the source of the sound down to a metal box mounted on the wall. A tiny red LED was flashing, but there was no label telling me what it meant and no obvious way to silence the beeping. I was sure I had the manuals for all of this equipment—somewhere. I tried Googling on my phone a bit, but I didn’t have enough information to go on. I knew I had contact info for both the well service company that had installed the system and our plumber, but it was 5 AM on a Sunday. Maybe one of them would make an emergency call for some outrageous amount of money, but I wasn’t even sure this was an emergency.
At this point I had a decision to make. I could be conservative, play it safe, call somebody to make an after-hours call, wake up the whole house, and spend hundreds of dollars on what might turn out to be nothing. Or I could ignore it for now, hope it was nothing, and risk… I didn’t know what. Losing water pressure in the house? Damaging the equipment? It could potentially wind up costing me thousands of dollars.
Then I had an idea. I pulled out my phone, opened ChatGPT, selected Advanced Voice Mode, and turned on the video camera. I pointed it at the beeping box, described what was going on, and asked for some advice. Without hesitation, it identified the piece of equipment as the UV filter, told me how to dismiss the alarm, and let me know I could safely leave it for now but that I should schedule a bulb replacement in the next few days. Exactly what an on-call plumber would have charged for $300 for, except immediately and with no fuss.
Emboldened, I wondered aloud if I could increase the water pressure in the house while I was down there. ChatGPT had me point the camera a the various components of the system and identified the pressure controller. I opened the control panel and pushed the up arrow button, but a small LCD screen said LOCKED. Hmm. I didn’t remember setting a code, so I tried my debit card PIN. No joy. I asked ChatGPT for advice. It suggested “1234”. Still no good. ChatGPT searched the internet, found the owner’s manual for this particular pressure controller, and found its default code: “7777”. I tried it and it worked. I increased the pressure up a couple of PSI. Magic.
What I had just experienced was intelligence-over-infrastructure. It made an impressively complicated system simple. It combined latent knowledge with near-instant information retrieval to transform a potential emergency into a non-event. And it changed my thinking about the possibilities of AI.
When non-experts, or even experts in a hurry, have access to an intelligent assistant, infrastructure incidents that are potentially expensive and time-consuming become stress-free and easily solved. And in the event of a real emergency, an expert assistant can help you solve the problem with a minimum of time, effort, cost, and stress.
At Spanning, we backed up our customers’ critical data. In the rare event that they needed to restore from backups, it was often an emergency. We designed our tools to be powerful and easy to use to minimize downtime, but we were limited to the technologies of the day: point-and-click interfaces plus traditional search. If we had been able to also provide them with a conversational, intelligent AI chatbot interface we would have been able to make the task of finding and restoring lost data so much quicker, easier, and less stressful.
It’s clear to me that enterprise infrastructure without such an intelligence layer will soon be considered dumb, no matter how pretty the UI or how complex the query builder. The intelligent tools that we all have grown to use in our daily lives will be de rigueur in enterprise settings, especially when simplicity and speed are more than nice-to-haves, they’re requirements.