Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:16):
Hi, Tony Poulos here at DSP Leaders World Forum 2025 in Sunny Windsor. Today we've got extra shot. This is the extra shot Chassin, and I have some hot shots with me in the extra shot. I have Chris Lewis, who is the managing director of Lewis Insights and Camille Mendler, who is the research director now at Omdia. New position. Welcome both of you. Look, today's first session was, it started to cover some very interesting points, but what stuck out for you? First up, Camille?

Camille Mendler, Omdia (00:48):
I've got to be honest, the insularity of thought was striking and disappointing to me. The one thing that no one really talked about was who's paying the salary and that is the customer. I think only one person talked about customers to any depth, and that was the guy Manish from Dell about customer experience. So I think we are still misguided as an industry unless we grasp that customer need.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (01:15):
Well, outspoken as usual. Well done Chris. I'm sure you're going to add to that somehow.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (01:20):
Well, I would like to point out that Gabriela did talk about the customer side as well because it's a topic that came up for recent events,

Camille Mendler, Omdia (01:27):
But she talked about the mechanics of demand. That doesn't sound like a humanized answer,

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (01:31):
But more around how the customer would drive the product in the future. I think that's what she was getting toward in the commerce towards the end. But I agree. I think we have been way too insular in industry and it takes people like Manish and Dell and outsiders to change the perspective. We talk about transformation of the industry. This is such a major transformation to begin to listen to what is being demanded of it from other parts of the IT industry. I think the other piece that obviously is always striking is we're talking about these moving parts. The discussion on RAN was an absolute breadth of fresh air to me because I think we've spent way too many column inches, way too many conferences talking about ran, and I'd like to rename it the also ran because I think we should be moving on and thinking about, once again, the product we deliver, the industry we're in, the value we bring to the economy and not looking so inwardly. In fact, we also, we went back and talked about we need to start with the core. Well, we may well do technically, but we need to start with the edge and what we deliver to the customers, what pays the bills to commence.

Camille Mendler, Omdia (02:37):
Yeah. But also when they were talking about transformation, what's the answer? No one can transform us except ourselves, the gentleman from Deutsche Telecom. Only we can be integrators of our own future. God forbid we should interconnect with enterprises or customers of any sort.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (02:56):
No, but I think that was in the discussion about whether you were insourcing or outsourcing the skills to deliver all of

Camille Mendler, Omdia (03:02):
The content. It was more than that. It was like really we only understand ourselves and let's just focus on our reality. But actually to succeed, you're going to have to integrate with other digital ecosystems. Absolutely

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (03:14):
Do. You've got to play nicely in the sandpit with

Camille Mendler, Omdia (03:15):
Everybody. Well, I didn't hear that. I did not hear that today. Not yet.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:20):
You can trust Chris Lewis to steal one of my best lines of the day. I wrote down open, got plenty open, ran cloud, ran, AI ran now and then I said, what's next? Also ran, and of course he's jumped on it straight away. Thank you very much, Chris. You're welcome. Look, we are also talking about AI native becoming AI native and it's not so easy. Everyone said it's not. So why is it not so easy? What are the issues?

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (03:43):
It's not, can you, alright, go ahead. I'll chip it. I think the issue is very much that we're still not quite sure what it is. It's a relatively immature market by the way. We've had AI in telecom for years and years and years. We used to call it expert systems and then it became machine learning and that's within that controlled data environment, controlled data set. We can do plenty around that to reduce that operational cost that we talked about. But I think in terms of leveraging it in the generative area and in the agen approach, we've got to be very careful about releasing the Kraken. It could be a very dangerous beast that we release if we don't have the right governance in place. And I know that's a slightly negative view of it, but I think once again, if we're thinking about the end product that we deliver for the customer, we've got to be really careful that the data that gets ingested into those systems is the right unbiased data and it delivers the outcome. But in fact, it ties back to the point that I think Gabriela made earlier on, that we've been focusing on the technology and I think there's a lesson from the outside of this industry. You look at players like Cisco who've been talking about outcome oriented solutions for a long time. We need to think about the outcomes, not about what we do. Alright,

Camille Mendler, Omdia (04:53):
Well here's an outcome. Consider this almost one in four bids are not responded to by enterprise sales teams in telcos because they can't get the information together. That's in 12, 15, 20, 30 different islands of information. That is where you use AI and that is where you're going to make some money. We are leaving money on the table that could be won. So AI is not just about using it in the network to create new revenues, but frankly getting our house in order. And we don't talk about innovation around sales tech or it doesn't sound so sexy versus network tech, but let's remember we need to make money,

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:34):
But they've got to have something to sell. And the problem is the new

Camille Mendler, Omdia (05:38):
Services aren't coming stuff. Let's sell the stuff we've got now better. Right?

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:43):
What's that connectivity?

Camille Mendler, Omdia (05:44):
Yeah, there's a bit of that to be sold

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:46):
Still.

Camille Mendler, Omdia (05:46):
Absolutely. Come on. And some other things.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:49):
We talked about, the guys talked about data again, how important the data is AI for everything. How long have we been talking about the importance of data and when are we ever going to get it right? I can't stop thinking about how many years with this come up

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (06:03):
Almost as long as you and I have been in the industry. Yes, Tony. And it is been an issue and I think it goes back to the conservative nature that was referred to in some of the discussion there, why things don't get done. And listening to the senior execs to people on stage today, the CEOs of these businesses, they do understand what they need to do. They're the ones who have the whole picture, but actually driving it through the bureaucratic organizations that exist within many of the telcos, not all of them, but within many of them is the real challenge getting things done. And the problem is that that data is fragmented into many of those departments within the organization and therefore we don't get that holistic view. So people like TELUS who've taken the data and put it out into a cloud to break down those silos will have a better opportunity to actually leverage it.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (06:51):
And I do agree, by the way, Kami, that the sales piece is something we haven't focused on. We never had to sell in the past, the business came to the industry and that for me is the biggest raise to the question of channel as well. So yes, we do need leveraging. I think Vodafone, I think Scott Petty's talked about ingesting all of the RFPs and learning from that and learning from that in order to address RFPs better. But I think you're right. We need to learn how to sell, how to listen to the customer and then understand what the product is.

Camille Mendler, Omdia (07:21):
Well I know some service providers who've actually invested in this who can give you a customer engagement score, which is going to give you a pretty good idea of what they're going to buy more of the rational adjacencies beyond connectivity that might be an AI experience or something like that might be security or something driven, consumed by an API. So I think there's work to be done and I don't think the execs know everything actually.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (07:45):
They dunno everything. And I think part of that and occurs to me when you look at the new execs being appointed, if they're moving around from telco to telco, it's not exactly bringing in new blood fresh thinking, is it? So I think we do need a bit more outside, but perhaps those people outside don't want to work in telco.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (08:01):
Yeah. Another thing that came up in the panel was the APIs and we don't seem to get a grip on the APIs. Why is the jury still out on APIs and why aren't we monetizing them after all this time talking about them?

Camille Mendler, Omdia (08:14):
There are very elegant means of consumption of features and functionality. Again, I go back to why would you want to use this functionality in what context? Right. But I can tell you, having spoken to actually, we've surveyed actually thousands of enterprises, they are interested in having control over quality of experience delivered via network. If they could actually control that credibly, yeah, they would pay more for it. Actually, that's

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (08:44):
What I'm thinking.

Camille Mendler, Omdia (08:44):
I know for a fact that they would, but the tools are not available. The contracts are not available.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (08:51):
And also pricing often is not available, is it?

Camille Mendler, Omdia (08:53):
No, the pricing model is not clear.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (08:54):
Yes. So we need to know what we're going to pay for this. But it fits in with certainly my thinking about the industry where we used to develop things internally and eventually expose them to the customers. This is the customers reaching into the network and taking out identity or triggering quality of service or any of those things. And that's the big change we need to the model, the business model we deploy. And it may well be by different channels. As I said before, not always the telco selling directly into the customer base. No,

Camille Mendler, Omdia (09:21):
It will be multiple

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (09:21):
Channels

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:22):
For sure. A while ago though, we talked about actually charging for the API usage. That was one of the thoughts that came up like a charging per transaction and api.

Camille Mendler, Omdia (09:31):
There are no, but there are some APIs where you would charge by transaction. It is already happening. There's some established models around that, but not every API is appropriate for that type of payment model. That's the point.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (09:43):
You say not all APIs are equal. They are not.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:46):
No,

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (09:46):
I think they're not.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:47):
Now listen very quickly, cloud native came up as well. Boy, oh boy. A number of panelists talked about the issues of becoming cloud native. Are they surmountable these issues that keep coming up. What is the issue with becoming cloud native core issue? No pun intended.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (10:05):
I think when any of these topics get the native label attached to them, whether we become cloud native, AI native, I think fundamentally we need to understand what business we're in and we focus way too much on the inner workings of the technology and cloud. Of course, we know cloud can help the hyperscalers. In fact, in part of the discussion about the integration skills being more required in-house, now of course that becomes possible because we're using the hyperscalers to do a lot of the heavy lifting outside of the traditional way that we would've done that business within the telco. So it is changing. So are we cloud native? It doesn't matter. We're using cloud, we're using ai, we're using all these things to deliver the services that ultimately people will pay for. And that's the business model that we're in.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (10:52):
And Cammie a quick closer on that from you.

Camille Mendler, Omdia (10:55):
Well, we're not at a happy ever after yet is what I would say for sure.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (11:02):
Chris Lewis, Camille Mendler, thank you so much for being with me today. Hang on a second because we are going to switch over now. We've got another hotshot session coming up a little later today. We've got four or five sessions coming up and before we go away, I'd like to remind our viewers out there, you can send in questions to us and you can have your say by taking part in our polls. You saw if you watch the earlier sessions, guy and Ray going through the poll results, we do want you to get involved with those polls and you can do that. There's one each day for the event and Guy and Ray will review the results at the end of each session. So thank you for being with us and see you at the next version of Extra Shot.