Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:04):
You're watching TelecomTV. We are joining from the FutureNet World 2024 in London, UK. Now I'm delighted to be joined by Jeroen Verbruggen, Director of Architecture IT Strategy and Program Management at Proximus. Hi Jeroen, thank you for joining us today.

Jeroen Verbruggen, Proximus (00:21):
Hello Yani.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:22):
So first do you consider your company as a digital service provider and what are your ambitions in this area?

Jeroen Verbruggen, Proximus (00:30):
I think yeah, the answer to that would be of course, yes. I think if you look historically, we of course incumbent telecom operator in Belgium. I think already in the past I think we've made significant progress in diversifying that business, growing that business towards some more digital search provider type of company. For example, I think to one of the operators in Europe, which I think that was able to compliment the telco business with a big IT business for B2B and I think a bit more in recent years, I think we've also been to acquisitions, growing a lot our international business, especially in digital identity and communication solution as a service, VR affiliates, big TeleSign. And most recently we also announced our intention to acquire linear CPAs company with mobile. Think also in our domestic markets, especially for consumers, we try to diversify as much reach as much offerings with. Very recently we launched a new app approximately pu, which is really going away from the traditional telco app to a real companion app that consumers can use to manage their telco with actually a range of other digital services to manage their day-to-day life in terms of mobility, their house energy and so on.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (01:53):
Great. And would you say that 5G investments have already made a significant impact on your revenue possibilities and what else can be done in this area?

Jeroen Verbruggen, Proximus (02:03):
I think as also I think voice by many periods on the conference, I think the challenge of 5G monetization is still ahead of us. I think we are today where I think many other peak made very significant progress in the rollout of our standalone network leading with that in Belgium, I think we start to see a very interesting use cases around 5G sizing quality of amount in different industry verticals that are very interesting to cool technology, very relevant of our society as well. If you look at the use case in healthcare, in agriculture, in logistics and so on. But I think now the challenge is how do we scale that and make that scalable. I think if you look at today the opportunity for 5G slicing still a very customer specific lot of specific implementation. So the aspect of standardization, scalability, that is still ahead of us.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (03:00):
And could you share some examples of using open APIs in your solutions?

Jeroen Verbruggen, Proximus (03:04):
Well, exactly what we are looking at. I think we are convinced to really fully leverage the full potential of 5G and especially slicing and quality on amount. We need to address many different segments from SMEs to S. They can go to markets, maybe they consume directly with us or via their same system integrator or via the hybrid scales. And in order to do that, I think the ability of operators to expose network APIs based on command standards that basically anyone can use to integrate advanced communication services and connectivity in their business applications, I think for me is one of the best ways to make sure we can drive a scalable business from 5G. So very concretely, we're working very hard. I think we already are able to expose some of these camera APIs, for example, quality on the mouse, but we're now mainly working on a platform on how to allow developers where in which context they work to use these APIs in a very frictionless way. And so it's about the right commercial platform, it's about the right tooling for developers to be able to use that in their applications to enrich the experience of their customers.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (04:21):
And obviously AI is the hottest topic right now in the telco industry. And not only what are your plans to implement AI in your operations?

Jeroen Verbruggen, Proximus (04:29):
I think we are, thanks to our affiliates at proximus, I think we have internally very big compete incentives on AI and generative ai. So I think we already have plenty of use cases implemented across operations, customer operations, internal operations, network and so on. I think what now, of course workflow on this, what can really make a difference in terms of really shifting the needles in terms of customer experience and profitability via ai, origin ai. I think there especially, we're seeing quite a lot of potential in really transforming the interaction with the customers and really making them allocate our experiences much more efficient. Interaction of customers. Thanks to Gene AI, they say the first results are quite promising on that front.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (05:25):
And what shift do you see in customer demands, especially enterprise customer demands and needs nowadays?

Jeroen Verbruggen, Proximus (05:32):
Yeah, I think what I think you see is that I think that we're really in that evolution of we were providing telecommunication services, basically allowing people to communicate with each other, have to at some point get some information from the internet to really a need to integrate advanced communication services in all business applications, in all business processes. So I think that needs to be able to have access to the network in a very flexible programmable way, for example, through 5G slicing. That is really what we need to work on and what I think customers will expect from in future.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (06:15):
Jeroen. Thank you very much for joining us.

Jeroen Verbruggen, Proximus (06:17):
Thank you.