The piece of tech making a telco more efficient
Friday, 27 March 2026
Spark says its new employee ‒ a script writing piece of AI ‒ has made the telco much faster at testing changes to its app and website.
Dubbed Vibe-e, it is basically a piece of software that replaces the need for a junior tester and the need to write code with instructions for testing automation software.
Spark chief technology officer Matt Bain told The Post Vibe-e was like a junior tester who could work much faster than the average employee.
He described it as an approach or a set of skills, which its people can use to speed up their work.
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“Test instructions take a lot of time to write, and if you think about a whole month's worth of code being deployed, that's a whole lot of instructions. Apps are also changing faster and faster, so you need to be breaking existing tests, and teams are really struggling to keep up with the speed of software releases. That's where the need for Vibe-e came from,” Bain said.
“Businesses like us currently change, if we're lucky, once a month, so there's a real incentive for us to speed up the way we develop software so that we can move faster and deliver good experiences for our customers.”
While AI took care of the technical side, physical employees were still in charge and deciding what action needed to be taken, he said.
“But instead of a human going and writing everything up from scratch, we just say, ‘Hey, Vibe-e, create test use cases for changing a mobile plan’ and Vibe-e will go and read all the information that we have. It will write all the draft cases and also suggest all the automated tests that can be run.”
Bain said the AI was saving the company from needing to hire more testers as the pace of change picked up.
“With Vibe-e, we can hugely accelerate the pace of our existing team.”
Vibe-e was still very much in the testing and learning phase, and it had not, and was not expected, to replace any employees
However, it was saving the company about half the time it would normally take to create new scripts at the testing phase, Bain said.
“The whole world is speeding up. If we can only move at the pace that our testing team can move, then we’ll close down.”
Spark currently employs about 50 people across its testing teams.
The telco started building AI at scale about six years ago, Bain said.
First it used predictive AI, machine learning models, then generative and now is beginning to use agentic AI across the organisation, agents that can think and act on an employees’ behalf.
Bain said AI was proving beneficial at Spark, but the technology still needed human oversight. “If you give AI really clear context and direction, you actually get a pretty good result, but it still needs reviewing by a senior person.
“Companies like us have so much to do technology wise. We haven't got enough people to do all we want to do, so the first step for us is how do we use this to go faster and deliver with the capability in the people we've got.
“Over time this will definitely will have more capability, and we'll be able to do more complex tasks, more reliably. The question is, how much human supervision will ever still need, and how quickly will that not be required.”
What does he tell his staff about AI fast development?
“What I tell my people is, right now, AI won't take your job, but someone using AI might, because if I am 50% more productive because I use AI, I'm more likely to get hired for a role or keep a role than someone who's not,” said Bain.
“Jobs get lost when AI comes in and replaces someone's tasks, and that person can't add value in any other way, but every business is looking to add value to their business and their customer experience.”
Bain said some companies overseas have no humans writing code, but developers that could cut 10 times more code using AI than you could before would be seen as valuable.
“If one company has that in a sector and others don't, that company is moving so fast that the others can't keep up, and their service will improve. That's a global trend that every business in the world is looking at and going, ‘Hey, in a world where we are always looking for an edge on our competitors to serve our customers better’, this is a crucial area to look at.”