Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:08):
We're in Barcelona. It's MWC 2026. I'm here with Shawn Hakl. He is senior VP of product at AT&T Business. Shawn, thanks so much for joining us at TelecomTV today.

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (00:19):
Hey, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you again.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:21):
Okay. So let's get stuck into it. A lot of the talk I've been having this week is all about the networks and technology and a lot of consumer, but the B2B sector, absolutely critical for this industry. What do enterprises want from telcos in 2026? What are the key demands of the B2B sector?

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (00:42):
Yeah, so it's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there's a few things you need to think through. First of all, they want experiences with the network that are simple, secure, reliable. And that's baseline expectation. And then what elevates that discussion, when you get past that, you start getting into deep discussions or real hardcore discussions about in this age of ubiquitous connectivity, what is your true diversity strategy? You've got options for physical diversity. You've got options for logical diversity. The way that you architect your network becomes important. Obviously, the next thing they want to talk about in the age of AI, you can't have a discussion with AI without a worry about privacy and security. So if you think about it, for the most part, the operator is the origination point for the transaction and the cloud and then the LLMs are the destination for a lot of those things.

(01:36):
In that process, there's a lot of concern about how much data is exposed, where things are flowing, how you manage where those tokens move and where they get spent. And there's an opportunity and enterprises are super interested to talk to the carriers about our ability to have visibility across all that, to give them options to control that flow. They're giving us the right to have the conversation with them and a request for them for help as they navigate through how they're going to deploy this technology in a way it's super exciting, but it also in a way that's secure, that's reliable, that's private. And as more business processes move on that, obviously the reliability and the diversity becomes a real concern. And that's what they're optimising around because it's critical core business processes that are relying on communications.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:23):
Absolutely. Yeah. And of course you're able to then bring the experience of speaking to lots of different enterprises to each conversation you have. So that's got to be ...

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (02:31):
And we're also a massive consumer of AI. So we learned a few lessons along the way.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:35):
So

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (02:37):
It's been fascinating.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:38):
Okay. Now you mentioned ubiquitous connectivity there, and that's actually become an even bigger deal, particularly in the last year and a half or so. As lots of low earth orbit satellites have gone up into the skies and the whole satellite communications landscape has changed. So what are these increasing investments in LEO satellite constellations meaning for a company like AT&T and what you can deliver to your customers?

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (03:06):
Yeah. Again, start with a customer first and what do they need? We already rely heavily on a convergent strategy. That's been AT&T's investment strategy's been a cornerstone of approach and it's worked super well for us. In other words, people want to get to the internet or they want to get to the cloud. So if you need to use wireless to get their fixed wireless or you're going with high capacity fibre, it's all good. Satellite adds another dimension to that. So it's another layer of physical diversity. It's a different set of infrastructure. It's more resilient to certain things and less resilient to others. So if you can integrate that flow evenly for the customer, it becomes yet one more way to guarantee the outcome, which is getting to the applications, getting the communications that need to be successful. And then there's obviously the physical advantages of where the satellites operate, where we cover 99% of the territory we service, but there are a few locations where this makes an awesome extension.

(04:01):
So from my perspective done properly and in partnership with the folks that are launching this, we have a great opportunity to make a better end-to-end experience.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:09):
Okay. Excellent. And it's great to see that engagement between all the satellite companies and the operators and thinking about the customer at the end of the day. Now obviously, you've already mentioned AI and this is just a really big deal for everybody in this industry. How is AI impacting what your team does, what it can offer to customers, and how is it changing the way you engage with your customers?

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (04:35):
Yeah. So there's really three outright ... AI changes where we build our network. It

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:40):
Changes

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (04:41):
How we build our network, and it changes the products we deliver. And so I'll give you a couple examples. So obviously you may have seen some of the press releases we put out where we're much more deeply engaged with the hyperscalers, because let's face it, the flattest, fastest path between the device, the cloud and the LLM is the optimal route for these AI transactions. The way the hyperscalers networks are architected, they're architecting the age of internet commerce and the age of agent to agent, agent to person communications, there's going to be some shifts in that. In the age where people are taking some of their data and maybe moving it to SLMs that are localised to protect it, you've got to have very high capacity fibre between data centres. So that's where you start building super high capacity capability into the hyperscalers, into the neo cloud providers.

(05:31):
So you basically have to build that physical layer out. Now to get that to be secure and to scale, you then have to move to the logical layer where you've got to get a lot more harmonised and a lot more simplified about how you execute policy, security policy, identity, load balancing, routing. All of that has to be simplified to be able to handle the increased volume of scale of these transactions. And then finally, you've got to present things as automated interfaces. You've got to make it agent consumable. People are going to want to use agents to manage this stuff

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:58):
To make

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (05:59):
The technology consumable by those agents. So that's a super important element. So that's how we face out to the customer. And we've already launched. So we've got AI based agent technology or AI assistant technology for things like an SMB assistant, call transcription on our contact centre offerings, various agent assist offerings as we go to market. We've already launched products that do that. You'll see us adding AI enablement to security offerings to network management offerings. There's some very natural progression there. Internally, these AI based tools are awesome in terms of we're able to go from concept to code very, very

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:40):
Quickly.

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (06:41):
So I essentially got a whole series of product managers working closely with our technology people, but instead of describing it, writing requirements, I can go from vision to execution very quickly. The other thing is, it's super cool is I can create digital customer twins. So if I want to find out how something ... We can go and take a sales pitch, fire it into a product value prop statement, fire it into a digital twin and get beaten on by the customer. With AI assistance, you can ask you questions like, how does this compare to competitor X, Y, and Z? And you're going to get some real time personable feedback. Now it doesn't limit the need for real customer research and code with customers. Sure.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:17):
In

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (07:17):
Fact, code with customers becomes easier in this model because if I can sit next to a customer, we can conceptualise together and translates that to code. Again, I have an even better opportunity to code dev with customers. So AI is changing a lot. I mean, it's cliché to say now, but we're executing on it. I can see it

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:34):
Real

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (07:34):
Live.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:35):
Really expanding the possibilities and capabilities. And also, what we're hearing is there's quite a bit of excitement around the combination of AI and network APIs and being able to capitalise on that. What prospect does AT&T see from the exposure of these network APIs?

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (07:59):
We're making revenue on network APIs. Not ready to replace my entire IoT budget yet, but we're making money on it, which is a good sign. Listen, so as we shift away from sort of thinking of the network as a fully vertically integrated service offering and starting to expose it as a platform around which other folks can build innovation, we view that as the path to participating in the application ecosystem. Obviously, API exposure becomes an important part. So when we can expose data in an ethical, consent-based way, we have an entire innovation ecosystem that can build on that. So it's a chance for us to reach out to people we haven't traditionally talked to, new markets through developers and solution providers. We've been pretty successful at that on the IoT side. There's no reason I can't take that and supersize it with a broader set of services out of the network.

(08:53):
Now, the problem there is achieving scale. No one's going to build apps for a single carrier. That's just not reality. I would argue that it's really, in a hyperscaler world, it's be interesting to see if they live in build for a single country.

(09:07):
So to the extent that the carriers can get together, offer a common set of services so that people can achieve scale, and that we push these APIs into existing developer ecosystems, right? People are out there, they've already made an investment in learning the ecosystem that they build in, whether it's the Amazon one, hyperscaler one or Vonage, or there's different flavours out there. We don't lose anything by pushing our capabilities into those developer ecosystems, capturing as much as that. But if you want to achieve scale, we need to work together. And this is a great opportunity for the carriers to monetise all the investments we've made in these programmable networks into 5G and truly making that information available. Now, again, it's what's going to be super important in the age of AI is privacy, security. So it's all about consent and ethical disclosure. But I think in most cases there's a ton of use cases, fraud prevention, fraud detection, those are clear public good cases.

(10:02):
We can focus there first. Absolutely. Right? That's a no-brainer. And then we'll see if we can earn the right to play in other areas as we get more experience with it and deploy it out. So I'm very excited about what we can do there.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:13):
Okay. And we're definitely seeing that collaboration now between the operators, which is great, and that will help to grow that particular part of the market. But on a more broad level, what can the operators learn from each other and how can they best go about sharing their insights for the common good? How can that happen?

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (10:36):
Listen. So there's a lot of places where cross carrier collaboration is super important. First and most obvious is security. And I know increasingly operators are doing that together, but listen, we carry the pipes that these attacks ride on in many cases. We have a broader visibility. A single enterprise gets hammered along one vector. We can see those attacks taking off and we have an opportunity. If we start sharing the patterns and the threats, we can collectively make the whole experience safer. And I think that's a super important thing. So on just making for an overall better network experience, security is a big one. As I mentioned, collectively, if we can achieve scale in enabling network capabilities and exposing it to the innovation ecosystem, there's a lot of people who figure out how to monetise the stack, right? Upstack.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:29):
Absolutely.

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (11:29):
They don't do it just by fully doing it end to end in their own walled garden. They actually involve the developer community, a lot of innovation out there across different industries. We have to tap that innovation industry, and we can only do that by achieving scale together. So that's another clear area. And then we can't lose the fact that just a Balkanised world where phones don't work together and you can't get from one place together with a connection seems like a bad way to do things. So it's going to be super important. We continue to do some things that made us successful in the first place, which is you can pick up a phone and it can land somewhere. Now I can plug into beneath their table and get to where I need to on the internet. Ton of value in that, people see that whatever we do to make sure that that continues is super important.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:12):
Okay. Well, I think that's a great message to end on in these kind of times when some of the global efforts have maybe been eroded away, but the communications sector appears to be wanting to hold strong, so that's good.

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (12:31):
No, it's all upward to the right. There's tons of opportunity out there and I'm looking forward to capitalising on it. Okay.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:37):
Excellent. Shawn, thanks so much for joining us. Great to hear from you and look forward to catching up again later in 2026.

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (12:44):
Awesome. Thanks for having me.