As mcdude was eluding to ANT is operationally useful when VHF comms are unavailable and you need to listen to voice transmitting navids in an comms failure emergency, or of you are after ATIS, cricket score etc.
In smaller aircraft to test the ADF, ANT mode is used to displace the needle, then placing it back … you know the rest, people use it when a test mode is not available. ANT does feature on transport CAT A/C, depends on the vintage.
. .The Airbus automatically decodes (and tunes) most navaids for you and displays the ident on the screen, it constantly monitors the ident so tune, identify, test, monitor is achieved visually not aurally. They do have Beat Frequency Oscillator (BFO) option, and you can listen to the ADF for operational reasons (like obtaining the cricket score to satisfy a passengers request) by using voice, but its nice as it filters out the morse code for you so you can get a nice clear ATIS message, it does nothing to the needle display like smaller a/c.
Z