Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
We are at Future net World 2025 in London. I'm here with Gabriela Styf Sjöman. She's the managing director of research and Network Strategy at bt. Gabriela, thanks very much for taking time to speak to us again, really much appreciated.

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (00:19):
Thank you, Ray. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:23):
Now, you were on the opening keynote panel here today at the event. A lot of topics are covered during that panel, but one of them was about the progress being made in the industry around network APIs and network exposure, and you talk specifically about the potential for the combination of APIs and ai. Can you tell us how that is going to impact the potential, the business potential and the operational potential of operators like bt?

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (01:01):
So the way I see APIs is that we've had the first generation of APIs. APIs have been around for a long time, so that is not new. But the second generation, the next wave of APIs, the value of those are going to be beyond them being more of a true network exposure. So that we're really enabling network capabilities for developers or verticals or because even for ourselves, what's going to make really powerful is that they are programmable. So APIs that, for example, APIs that could do intelligent routing, rerouting based on predicted congestion. We talk about programmable networks, which are service aware, intent driven network. At the heart of this is ai, you need to have an intelligent network. So there's a really strong power between aligning AI and APIs and in particular saying that next generation of APIs, which are programmable APIs. And that's really at the heart for us. It's really at the heart of that evolution as well from moving away from a pure connectivity provider to more of a platform driven, insights driven service provider.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:31):
Now, I guess at the heart of this is being able to deliver what customers actually want and what they might need. And we also heard in the panel that there is a sense that finally communication service providers, digital service providers are thinking from the user perspective rather than what can we deliver? Do you get a sense of that is really happening? Is the tide turning? Are service providers really think of the customers first and working backwards from there?

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (03:05):
To a large extent, I think that we're now talking about the importance of doing it.

(03:12):
I always say that you cannot fix something or do something better unless you know what you need to be better at. So I think the first step is recognizing that we've been focusing predominantly on the supply. So supply for me is building the network we build and we hope that the demand will come and the demand driven by something else. Now we're shifting away. Actually a big shift has to be from building a network for mass market only, where what you build for your mass market is also needed by your B2B customers to say, well, to understand that a lot of the capabilities that we're building in the network are for edge cases for B2B and B two GG being the government.

(04:04):
And that requires to understand their problems. It's not building a mass market, there's not a mass market problem. There are different enterprises and governments. They have different problems, different sets of challenges they want to address and we need to understand those outcomes. They want to solve for an outcome. So understanding how you solve for that outcome and the role that we play through that trusted, secure, elastic connectivity is going to be essential because the connectivity itself only does not lead to that outcome. It's really an ecosystem ranging from device to the platform to the application. And to understand that how we bring that together requires that we get much closer to our customers and to that outcome. And I think we're on a journey in that direction because we talk much more about the need to understand the demand for the supply that we build.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:08):
Okay. So would it be true to say that it's perhaps it's not easy, but easier to understand the requirements and then predict the outcomes in B2B and B two G, but less so in B2C in the consumer mass market? Or is that harder to predict?

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (05:32):
I think it's harder to predict the B2B demand because they're much more scattered enterprises. They're small enterprises, medium enterprises, large enterprises at different maturity levels of digitalization with different p and l. Some are startups. My point is that consumers, what predominantly has been driven, the demand for connectivity from the consumer lens has been the phone on the mobile network and your internet. So often we were used to being able to predict the demand because there's going to be a new device launch. That's not the case on the enterprise side. So they're a little bit more, I wouldn't say it's just that they're different and they require probably different approaches to it. And however, what we've seen now when it comes to the consumer segment is that demand is not declining, but it's not growing as fast as in the past.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:44):
Okay. Okay. And that's the data volume?

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (06:48):
The data volume, sorry. Yes, correct. The data volume. So we've gone, it is not only in bt, we've seen this, we see this across the world where most telcos have in the past seen a data growth of 50% or even more year over year. And that has, even before covid, it began to decline. Then we saw a little bit of spike up again after covid, everything goes back into action again. But now we see that steady decline. And I think globally, I mean we see it's in the ranges of 10 to 15% compared to, so it's still significant because the absolute number is still high, but it's the growth per se is flattening out. And that's because there's only so many hours of the day that you can be streaming something. While on the enterprise side, you see we've probably only seen the tip of the iceberg of what we can do. So therefore I certainly believe that we as telcos play a really critical role in economic growth.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:00):
Okay, so still easier you think to predict the B2C outcomes and how that's going

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (08:06):
Yes.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:06):
Okay.

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (08:06):
I think it's easier to predict that than in the hand B2B.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:10):
Okay.

(08:11):
And then another topic that came up in that panel was one around standardization. And of course standards are always being talked about, but there's a little bit of an uptick now because the officials six G standards process has just begun. So it's a bit more out there in more headlines being talked about a bit more. But there's also a lot of criticism of the way that the standards process works because it kind of works in the same way as it did 20 years ago and the world has moved on a little bit since 20, 30, 40 years ago. So is there something that needs to change or can change within that process that would help the operator community, the vendor community, and also users and customers?

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (09:03):
When it comes to standards, I often start by saying that the blessing for telecoms is standards. Because without standards, we don't scale interoperability and scalability. The curse is standards. Why the curse? Because it's just so slow. Everything needs to be so rigid that the lead time from invention to adoption is years. Years. First of all, that kills innovation. It doesn't attract the most innovative companies. We need to broaden our ecosystem beyond the traditional telco players because the ecosystems are expanding. But you won't attract a startup to come with innovation and standards if it takes them five years. They want results in two years. Number one. The second challenge or opportunity I see as well is who is actually contributing to standards? Well, it's once again, predominantly it is a telecom vendor, equipment vendors who are doing a great job innovating, but there's a big disconnect between that invention and innovation going into standards and the adoption. And we need to invite, we need to have the adopters, which in this case are the verticals as well as those who contribute to the broader ecosystem system integrators, device manufacturers, they need to be invited to be around the table, but we need to incentivize them to come. We need to move at faster speed than what we do today.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:42):
Is any of that possible?

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (10:45):
Ray, I often say that if we put man on the moon in 1969, we should be able to speed up standards

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:53):
And get users. Because one of the big challenges for so long has been that talking the same language as enterprise users, getting engaging with developers, people have been talking about this for years and things never seem to move on, but

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (11:10):
We have to make it work. So I think the question should be, I often ask is that what needs to be true for this to happen? So for this to be true, we need to understand, we need to go and ask the developers. We need to ask the verticals what would it take for you to be part of this? And then we'd reverse and we say, okay, what is it that we need to change?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:35):
Rather than just saying, well, we invited you and you didn't come

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (11:37):
Exactly

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:38):
Right. Okay,

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (11:38):
And you didn't contribute. No, maybe why didn't they come the second time? Maybe because they fell asleep because we were discussing one thing for hours and hours and hours. So I think absolutes is possible, but we need to, what needs to be true for this to happen?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:57):
Plenty of food for thought there, Gabriela. And I'm sure that that conversation, because I know that six G has kicked off a lot of conversations about standards and specifications, so on and so forth. Sure. That's going to continue throughout the year and we look forward to talking with you again soon at the DSP leaders World Forum in Windsor as well.

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (12:16):
Well. Yes, likewise Ray.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:17):
Look forward to that, Gabriela. Thank you very much.

Gabriela Styf Sjöman, BT (12:19):
Thank you.