‘AI is Great for Exposing Things We Don’t Know’: Adelaide University’s Bruce Northcote

When discussing the role of AI agents across enterprises today, Adelaide University’s Bruce Northcote winds the clock back more than 35 years.

In January 1990, one rogue line of code crashed AT&T’s long distance phone network in the United States, leaving millions unable to make calls for 9 hours.

Years later, Northcote joined what was then Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), a company tasked with trawling through telephone network protocols to determine what went wrong and how to prevent it happening again.

“We had to start mathematically testing protocols; if you can get mathematical proof of things, that’s useful. We still didn’t trust the vendors that rolling out equipment [across the phone] networks.

“We sent people to do “shake and bake” [stress] testing of switches as they were being released, and we still managed to break some of them. They still weren’t fit for purpose,” he says.

He…