Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:00:31):
To start day two of this year's DSP Leaders World Forum, we have an extended keynote session that takes the market perspective on the digital services opportunity. Yesterday we opened up with the digital service provider perspective, and today we're looking at it more from the customer's point of view. How well do telcos and DSPs engage with their customers? Where and how can they improve? What do customers really want from their digital service providers? And are the service providers listening? Well, let's meet our guest panelists and I'm going to ask them to briefly introduce themselves. So let's start at the far end of the stage with Lord Holmes. Thank you very much.

Chris Holmes, UK House of Lords (00:01:18):
Good morning everybody. There was an imposter at the end of yesterday's session on a FinTech panel called Lord Chris Holmes. I'm the Real Deal That was digital twin. Great to be here this morning to talk all things customer and how we look to the future in this industry. Great, thank you.

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:01:36):
Good morning everybody. Colin Bannon, CTO, BT Business.

Pablo Espinosa, IBM (00:01:41):
Good morning everyone. My name is Pablo ESP Spinoza and I lead an organization that manages and operates IBM's private hybrid cloud infrastructure and global network site. Emphasize private. This is mostly on the enterprise side, which encompasses compute, storage, networks, connectivity, and all the data center facilities. First time here at DSP by the way, so I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:02:04):
Welcome, Lasha.

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (00:02:06):
Good morning everyone. My name is Lasha. I am group chief digital operations officer at VEON Group and I'll be speaking today about how VEON is redefining digital inclusion in frontier markets. And thanks for having me here.

Colin Wilson, Verizon Business (00:02:20):
Pleasure to have you and Colin, thanks for having us. Good morning everyone. Yeah, Colin Wilson. I'm the CTO for our EA headquartered customers on the working the wire line side of Verizon business. So spend my time talking to customers about what they are expecting from us.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:02:32):
Okay, fantastic. So we have a great mix of people here to give different views on the digital services opportunity. So let's start with a big picture view because a lot of network operators are still arguing about the pipe versus platform approach while the hyperscalers continue to outspend them. So what is the counter strategy if telcos can't match this level of investment? How can network operators be challenging and delivering the kind of services that customers need in the face of the co-op petition from the hyperscalers and others? Maybe Colin from bt, maybe we can start with you on this one.

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:03:27):
Yeah, sure. I think it's a really good question. Hyperscalers for us are brilliant partners and I think from a platformization there's a lot that telcos can learn from the hyperscalers simplicity and their focus and how they've re-platformed. And I've certainly learned a lot from them in terms of how we're applying platform effect, network effects, the brilliance around. And it's really quite an uncomfortable journey when you're transforming yourselves as well, particularly for people like product managers where you are transforming to where multiple stove pipe legacy stacks. I mean BT for instance is about 189 years old. It's the oldest telco in the world and we have over 250 million connected devices and we're running about a hundred exabytes through our core and we're running many, many critical national infrastructures on the back of our core, including 45 million worth of nine, nine calls, emergency services and running the connection for all the emergency services.

(00:04:44):
But so we're very conscious when we transform and start to learn about platformization and we've got many big bets as we're transforming. It's kind of like changing the engine of the jumbo jet while it's flying. The number one thing for us, and part of the reason we're a little slower than a most, and there's many reasons sometimes on the transformation is about trust. We cannot lose that trust and that we're very conscious of the souls that are in the plane, the souls that are in the hospital, the people who are manufacturing and the logistics and the banking to keep U-K-P-L-C running and our international customers that we serve in over 180 countries. So I think there's lessons to be learned, there's a lot of cooperation and I'm less worried about the threat, but more about how do we partner and how we learn and then apply some of those lessons to ourselves and speed up the pace of innovation and how we transform and move forward.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05:45):
And are there plenty of opportunities for targeted investments that allow telcos essentially to differentiate themselves in the market where everybody apparently desperately wants some kind of AI service of one kind or another? Is there this opportunity for the telcos to stand out and make themselves seen in the crowd

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:06:12):
Again, just to follow up? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, context is king. We've been around this cycle a few times. Many of the AI leaders in each of our organizations will say, well, I'm the original gangster for ai. I was doing AI before chap bt. And what we found previously was, unless you understand the context of what you're doing in terms of the quality of the question to work with ai, then you're probably not going to get customer value out of it. So what do telcos understand? We understand networks, we understand service, we don't necessarily understand the intricacies of our customer's business. So democratizing that data and making it accessible and then monetizing it, that data, whether it be geospatial, whether it be volumetrics, whether it be the fact that we get over 200 million worth of threat signals on our network every day and every device on that network that is connected, we're protecting the nation from that side. There's a tremendous amount of context that we have and the rich history and what our customers trust us to be able to do to monetize from that bedrock of trust where you start to perhaps go off the rails if you start doing, I dunno, intelligent yogurt or things that are way out there that are not on your bedrock, on your pillar. And that's the area that I think we're taking is sort of building from the core strength of the context that we

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:07:37):
Have. Right. Yeah. And we've seen plenty of instances over the years where diversification hasn't necessarily worked for companies in the telecom sector. Colin, if I can come to you now from a Verizon business perspective, obviously like Colin at bt, you are focused more on the needs of enterprise customers. What does that mean for a company like Verizon trying to put yourself forward and invest in the right ways? When I was just looking this morning, Microsoft has announced another 400 million investment just in Switzerland in its data center facilities and part of a much larger investment. So how do you make yourself heard in the enterprise community in the face of that kind of noise from the other side of the fence?

Colin Wilson, Verizon Business (00:08:27):
I think to follow up from Colin, I think it's largely about sticking to what we know and what we do best. So when I speak to customers, their overriding ask of us is provide me with the connectivity requirements. I have to connect my users to my workloads or workloads to workloads. So providing that connectivity at scale consistently is the mantra I keep hearing. And how we do that and differentiate from the hyperscalers I think is really around exposing our services in a way that customers want consume them and they're all different. So we might talk about this a bit later on, but all of our customers are on that digital journey. Some are at the beginning of that and that and don't have an ability to consume services in a completely digital manner. So we need to be able to support them exposing our services in a way that allows 'em to take that journeys in steps they can manage, I think is a key place where we can differentiate. And then there will definitely be niche services where it makes sense to come to a telco for a vertical set of capabilities. Very interesting chat with intelligent connected vehicles yesterday. That's an area where I think the telcos have a strength because we are used to providing that last mile of access. The place the hyperscalers are less comfortable is in that last mile of connectivity, getting to the user while connecting the car, connecting the driver. That's the sort of thing where I think the telcos have a real advantage

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:09:47):
And Lasha from the veon perspective. How can a company like Vion deliver unique services that maybe others can't

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (00:09:59):
Look? Vion is operating in very dynamic markets, like six markets all over the world, like starting from Ukraine after Tostan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kazakhstan. But these markets are heavily underserved in the digital services. So back in the years when we started our strategy, which we named digital operator 14 and 40 like we're 14 and 41,440 stands for the minutes a day. We tapped into the verticals by creating financial services, entertainment services, healthcare services, and just recently into the ride hailing, just to give you the numbers, when having 160 million sim card customers, we have already 125 million digital applications and platform users and it's already 14% of top line revenue of the group. It's standalone businesses. So we entered the markets having all the data, what was just mentioned, what we had on network side, on customer interaction side, and we listened to the markets, we listened to the communities and we started the businesses which are meaningful for them to really create a digital moments.

(00:11:08):
Therefore, I personally think that it's not about competition or once again speaking about the pipe. We have everything to go from just infrastructure to intelligence as telecoms, we have lots of data in view and specifically we have now not only telecom data which is available for us, we also have data about the financial services usage in the markets. And I'm speaking about the millions, like 40 million plus people using our financial services, 40 million plus people using our entertainment services, 28 million customers registered in our healthcare platforms and super apps in each market, which already counts more than 45 million. So it's huge amount of data, it's advantage even with the hyperscalers, but it's not about competition, it's about using all infrastructural spinoffs to really deliver the value to whom where it matters the most. These are the customers, whether it's B2C or B2B. So that's how we do our business

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:12:11):
And we're going to come to that customer specific focus in a second. Pablo,

Pablo Espinosa, IBM (00:12:17):
Maybe just a different perspective. Obviously IBM is not a telco company, but we are in the middle of a pretty big transformation around looking at rolling out a much more internet based architecture across the globe. And part of the challenges that we're seeing in regards to this question here, pipe versus platform is we're obviously anticipating continued data growth coming in and a lot of that data growth comes with a lot of complexity. And in terms of that complexity, it's really how you connect that data in a much more horizontal scaled out manner. And so when we do have these discussions with the telcos in terms of that, I mean I do fundamentally believe it's not a pipe versus platform question, but it's maybe a pipe with platform type of approach, which really could lead to a lot more of a shifting the dialogue from transaction to more partnership type of aspects. I know there's a lot of changes happening right now with telcos partnering with hyperscalers and so forth, which is great to see. But just from a perspective aspect of things, I think things are moving really fast right now and I think part of this is just some level of change has to happen. We're also recognizing the Collins point, how tremendously challenging it is to where do you start uplifting a legacy environment and start to chip away at laying out a more horizontal scale. So just a perspective I think on the question itself. No,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:13:54):
That's great. And Chris, I wanted to come to you because Colin made a great point there about how the communication service provider community delivers absolutely essential services. And I was chatting last night too during the dinner as well and getting the perspective of there was a lot of focus on how important these services are, especially during the lockdown and the COVID years. And everybody was like, thank goodness for these companies who know what they're doing. And that's kind of faded away. It's like, oh, back to normal, not maybe getting the recognition, is there more that maybe should be done to help the communication service provider community from not necessarily a state level but a broader level to ensure that these services are not only there for the nine nine calls, but delivering more from a social aspect and to support in the case of Britain, the UK PLC? Certainly I think

Chris Holmes, UK House of Lords (00:15:03):
To the overall discussion we've been having, first things first, don't be in fear of or have councils of despair or be overly shaped or guided by what the hyperscalers have done and are doing. It's a particular play coming from a particular geography and economy and be aware of that, but don't be overly shaped by it because it's sort of a narrative which goes around, it's almost the hyperscalers are going to vacuum up everything that they choose to. But the truth of it is don't try and be something that you're not focused on. The essential elements of your particular business, certainly your customer base and has come up in everybody's contributions so far, quite rightly, data, data, you have such rich data oceans, but before even diving into those go to the purpose, go to what is trying to be achieved. And as you say, your businesses are already involved in so much critical infrastructure, the open reach project, everything that happens to be critical services.

(00:16:23):
And probably all of that takes me to the point that there probably is an urgent need for a recrafting of the narrative around this particular ecosystem to better connect with the general public about what is already happening and what that might look like and what the pathway for development is with that, with taking every individual and indeed their data on that journey in a real enabling and greater connection with the customer, but in an enabling and empowering way. And if you look for example, we talk about all of these technologies rightly, but we talk about it and an environment of painful levels of digital exclusion. And the financial exclusion often goes hand in hand with that. So for companies like BT and others, there's a key role to play. Not that it's in any sense one business's obligation or responsibility, but it's an excellent strand to have as part of the business. And if we're to have fully enabled individual citizens communities, then those elements are critical to it. And the great good fortune, like all of these things, it doesn't need to be seen as nice to have or CSR any of those boxes. It's a good thing to do. It's a good social thing to do and it makes good business sense as well.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:17:57):
Yeah, no, absolutely. Because if you give customers what they want and help them out and make them feel like they're getting something extra useful value add from their service provider, they're obviously going to stick with that company a little bit longer. So I want to dig a bit deeper into this topic now because very often the communication service provider sector is accused of not being great at customer service, not listening to its customers properly. So I want to ask the panel, are customers being engaged in the way that best suits them? Are customers with the kind of AI enabled interactions that they tend to see now, especially from the consumer side, is there a better way to engage with customers, for example, via super apps or loyalty schemes that might introduce them to additional useful services? Lasha, if I can start with you from maybe the consumer side and obviously some of the emerging market side. Is there a way, you talked about some of the services that ION has launched over the years. How much of that is because there is just a lack of these kinds of services available or a recognition that there is a pent up demand and real need? And how do you engage in getting feedback from your customers about whether you are delivering what they really want?

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (00:19:37):
Great question. So I personally think about the customers that first of all, they don't look just for service delivered. They look for a solution which is personalized and contextualized and tailored to them. Regarding to your question, I started with that, that we saw that communities were really underserved. For example, biggest example I can tell you is financial services in Pakistan. When we saw this in banks like serving only 27% is banked in Pakistan, its country is 25 million population. And we launched the service using data and scoring systems, which we already had. And all the modules which we had in telecom, we started small and scaled up. So we became real financial enabler and driving CSR projects and focusing, for example, enabling women in SME business and giving micro loans like we're giving out 150,000 loans a day and we built a merchants network of 350,000 all around the country.

(00:20:47):
The same to your question or coming back to your question for example, how we interact with them, this is also very important that your customers based on their behavior and the data. So there is no one single solution because if we all say that we will serve everyone with AI agents, yeah, it'll be once again something decided within the team and we are confident that people will love it. No way. You have to have, we have super apps where we do everything through the AI agents and speaking in local languages with the customers and there are customers who use this a lot. We have smart IVRs where people prefer to do it themselves, but we still have of course the call centers because there are people who still want to call you. But where AI comes here into game is when someone is calling you at your call center, speed of solution you give to the customer is much, much faster because you have all the information and you have suggestions generating by AI and supporting our service providers to really help customers solve their problems.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:21:53):
Okay. And is there empirical evidence that is actually happening that is really helping the customer service agents be able to deliver for a better experience?

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (00:22:04):
Absolutely. And I will tell you more. Even if we put aside the AI and generative ai, which is becoming more and more important for the daily operations, like telecoms and digital service providers, we're using machine learning for a long time. There were lots of platforms even before AI came in where when someone was calling, we knew it's you and we knew about your behaviors and we were trying to serve you the best. But what is more important right now that with AI power and generative power, we aggregate all the data and as I've said, so we are not providing just the connectivity, we are providing lots of other essential digital services to the customers. So the profiling and the data we have is much, much more enriched than we used to have when we were just telecom. So of course it's helping a lot to our teams. It's perfect solution for the customers. And definitely going forward we're tracking and looking like if someone wants to interact through the application. So the super app, of course we will do the best to have the best experience there, but we never forget people who simply don't know right now how to use or how to prompt or how to ask the questions to any digital agent

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:23:24):
And loyalty schemes. Is that something that ION has looked at?

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (00:23:28):
That's very important point. That's very important point because like telecoms and VEON specifically I'm speaking about VEON, we are creating ecosystem and definitely you need to have a top-notch loyalty system where it doesn't matter in which touchpoint customer is interacting with you. When I mentioned just an example for you, like 125 million DIGITALISTS users, digital application and platform users, 30% of them is not even our sim card customer. So you have to interact with them, you have to understand their needs. And then of course with this loyalty platform, you can suggest and always bring the best offer to them into other verticals you can deliver to the customers.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:24:15):
And Colin, from the Verizon business perspective, is it easier or harder or different these days to engage with the B2B community? Because obviously there aren't as many business customers as there are consumers, but I think as we heard yesterday, the number of SMEs in India is astronomical or something like a hundred million SMEs or something like that. Now how easy is it these days or how is it different to engage with that kind of community and how can you find out and meet the needs of all these specific industry verticals that you have to engage with?

Colin Wilson, Verizon Business (00:24:59):
Yeah, it's a good question. There are definitely some parallels, and I think much like the consumer space, it very much depends what the customer's trying to do. Whether an AI agent is the right solution for them, if it's something simple and standard, I think there's far more demand from customers to just automate this stuff. And almost we're starting to see our managed service teams predict what the customer's going to want or offer at the moment, offer advice that says, we think you should adopt this package or look at this solution. Again, driven by ai, driven by knowledge of what the customer's been doing, the data we're able to pull together from different interactions that enterprise is having with us across geographies, products and services. The place where it's perhaps different and where AI I think will still take a while to come up to speed is many large enterprises certainly have quite bespoke requirements.

(00:25:48):
So understanding those and being able to deal with those challenges, there's still a gap there for people at least for the time being, I think to interact and almost having that ability to drop out of an automated workflow or engagement to a human being when it's the right time. So we use some technologies to look at how frustrated is the customer getting, should we divert them to an escalation path or do something to handle this interaction differently? There's some of the things we're doing internally, but definitely from a customer engagement perspective, what does the customer want? It depends what they're trying to achieve. Simple stuff they really want, they want automation. They're happy to engage through an AI agent or a bot for the more complex nuanced requests, which are often, can you advise me? Can you come and look at this problem and see if you can help? I think those tasks for the time being at least are still going to be driven by people, albeit with AI assisting them in the background.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:26:40):
Right, absolutely. And Pablo, can we get your perspective from the internal markets kind of approach? How is your engagement with the people that you need to deliver to? How is that changing? How are you managing that?

Pablo Espinosa, IBM (00:26:57):
Yeah, so my first 30 days at IBMI sat with the team and I said, Hey, show me what you're working on and tell me why we went through this basic discovery process of what the teams are working on. And within the first couple of weeks I quickly realized that in service to our own customers, which is our end users, our applications that we run, we didn't have a really well-defined problem statement or problem space in regards to how and what we were trying to solve for. And so we went forth and began looking at redefining this. We pretty much killed a number of initiatives that were on the table, A lot of knee jerking from the team happened, everything was going to break this and that. Nothing happened really. And essentially what we did is we restructured things in a way that as a product offering to our end users and to our applications and began to really lay out a much more focused set of problems that we were trying to go and solve for on behalf of those end users.

(00:28:16):
The reason I share this is because part of where we're at now is we're executing that transformation. We're really staying focused on the problems, but now when we have engagements and I have engagements with say the telcos or network vendors, it's really driving that dialogue around not so much what I need you to solve for me, but it's more specifically, what complexity are you going to drive and eliminate from my environment? What are you going to do to simplify my operating model? How are you going to integrate with my automation standards and so forth, right mean? And those become good dialogues because in many aspects, a lot of the things that we'll find and we will see is some solutions were being developed, but basically they were the right solutions at the absolute wrong time. And when it's at the wrong time, I think typically you just add more complexity into the operating model as we go. So it's a bit of our perspective and then we're still learning I think in terms of just how we engage and how we engage even with our own customers as we're starting to really chip away at those problems. But I mean it really does start with that dialogue and open that up in terms of just sharing out how we need to think about the problem space and what we're solving for.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:29:32):
Okay, I'm going to come to Chris and Colin in a second, but I also want to come to the audience in a few minutes. So if you have any questions for our panelists, please prepare to put your hand up and Tony is going to be going around with our roving microphone. So Chris, if I can come to you next and ask you whether your experience as a customer has changed in say the past couple of years, do you feel that you are being better engaged by the service providers that are looking to have you as a customer? And what would you like to see done better?

Chris Holmes, UK House of Lords (00:30:12):
I definitely think that we should bring back Maureen Lipman for the bt. That was a high watermark, wasn't it? And Bob Hoskins as well. A shout out for Bob. I

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:30:24):
Liked that, Bob.

Chris Holmes, UK House of Lords (00:30:25):
Exactly. It's always dangerous to talk an anecdote, but why not for a moment? Having been the great good fortune of getting mobile telephony from EE and landline, I've still got a landline. Come on, tradition still counts. With bt, I felt very good as a customer when the tie up happened. And this is good customer service delivery, no sort of big form, no nothing, getting a text going. Would you like to have double the data that you currently have, text back Y or N? Not the most difficult question I've faced in my life, happy days. But I think that really ties into the sense of what is possible now, both in terms of looking at embedded and looking at personalization and what all organizations have the power and the potential to do now is really deliver to that personalization agenda. So it's easy. And what's generally been the past, not just in telco, been a lot of businesses just a spoon on any services, and that's fine if they're sort of general services, but when you start really getting into that personalization and thinking into that, then it becomes very special and obviously and easily spreads out into how you approach marketing, how you approach brand, how you approach product.

(00:31:53):
It all makes a lot of sense. And again, I think it's for all organizations to feel confidence, but evidence-based confidence that it's not about having to try and become a hyperscaler or trying to outspend a hyperscaler. That's not the game. The game is to really focus on what you want to do, what you're currently doing, how to transition to that point and it's data. And I suppose finally, one of the, in some ways ironies of our time is that when we have extraordinary technologies in our human hands right now because of the way that AI works, there will be a necessary, not necessary, there'll be an inevitable but not so much understood move towards the mean if you just rely on that in terms of the service delivery and customer connection. So what does that mean? Ironically, there couldn't be a time in our human history when CX has been more important because having that bedrock of the tech, but really having the most sensational cx, which the data and really understanding the personalization approach allows you and it'll be those companies that you'll see coming through.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:33:17):
Yeah, no, that's a great point. And as you mentioned, there's a lot of data there and maybe it isn't being used to that customer engagement advantage yet in the way it could be. And Colin, just to come back to the enterprise engagement, and we're going to move on to a bit more to that enterprise opportunity in a moment, but are enterprises being engaged with in a way these days that best suits them, do you think? And are things changing from that perspective?

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:33:49):
Well, let me put you in the mindset of a CIO today that I serve because obviously I'm coming from an enterprise perspective. They're sitting there on a mountain of tech debt, they're sitting, running, scared every day. Many of them are saying, I'm one black swan away from losing my job at the barricades. And you see that many retail customers right now on the newspaper coverages are being under relentless malicious attack from cyber threat, persistent, sophisticated threat and their operational processes. They've realized, and this is a good thing I think from service providers, that the network, there is no plan B operationally without the network at this point.

(00:34:39):
You give you an example of, say MasterCard, in the previous days they used to have that little card machine. If the network was down, they could put the piece of paper on there, put your card on it, go. They don't have that now. And we were in a period where we all gaslighted ourselves. You were talking Chris about the hyperscalers, and they'd done a brilliant job with their narrative about the importance of the compute because it's just another person's data center and some brilliant services around it. But for some reason, we as an industry did not do a good job about making the network the narrative around the importance of the network.

(00:35:19):
The network is a prerequisite for AI to work. It will not work without it, and operational processes won't work without it. And so with the tech debt with they're being disrupted, there's incredible transformation that they're trying to transform as well. And so I think the challenge for service providers is how do you make the services that we provide more democratized, more addressable, more available, more agile? Because let's face it, service providers have not been agile to go at the speed of the business that perhaps the CSPs have been able to do to allow, how do you make the network to be a transformative tool in their transformation journey and the importance of that as they move to extremely, we're seeing these customers becoming worrying about regulatory challenges around sovereignty, worrying about most boards right now are thinking the unthinkable six months ago, 12 months ago. They're in their risk registers in their board now around the volatility.

(00:36:25):
And they've got new terms around protection of external immunity from external legislation. There are real concerns, real challenges, real existential problems that rely on the network and the network needs to, and the communication services that we provide need to raise to that challenge. And on our side for ourselves, we've considered transforming how we did these sort of stove piped individual platforms. And I saw somebody who is one of the grandparents in the audience kneel over there hiding in the corner on the global fabric platform that we started about three years ago. It's incredibly hard to transform, but incredibly rewarding. And it needs to be done as you platformized so that you collapse all your services into a single platform that can move at the speed of the business, but also has unprecedented levels of operational resilience and treat it like it's a critical national infrastructure and at the same time expose all the services.

(00:37:37):
And as we've transformed our network collapsing, MPLS, internet, ellan, Eline, DDoS, all these services into treat the wide area network, because AI has escaped, it hasn't been launched, it's escaped into the networks and we never talk about the implications of the AI in the network and the wide area network. Now our thesis was in the data center. Remember what was great in the data center, you had infinite capacity, you had great microsegmentation, you had great visibility, great control, and great agility, and then you raise a change ticket with your service provider and you wait six months for that change to actually happen. We needed to up our game from that side and our thesis was actually the fabric. Now there's all this east west communication going on between highly distributed right down to the device where AI is working and you need to create a fabric that extends beyond the land fabric. And now the WAN is the newlan and that new architecture that we needed unprecedented orchestration, visibility and control and rethink what the white area network work looks like. And with our global fabric product, that's where we're going with that. But what's been really interesting is because it's API first, the platform ecosystem, because service providers can't live without an ecosystem. The service providers that are providing services on top can plug into that and it can go instantly rather than six months, it's in six seconds.

(00:39:08):
And also that you have a new interaction platform where customers, enterprise customers can start to have personalized consumerized, hyper-personalized, you mentioned experiences as well where they can that data that you used to need a DBA and you have to wait for a structured report every month and it would take an army of people to get that data for you. Now you can have it at your fingers and anybody who's using it can start to ask insightful questions and make informed decisions real time and also to model into the future. And what we found was that our platform, as we turn from a structured managed service provider into a platform with a managed service provider, all of a sudden other people are coming to the door liking it. One is the partners, other telcos, so we can become transparent to each other to serve outcomes for our customer. And two, the DIYs, the really big banks and people who just would want to build themselves, they wouldn't necessarily want to deal with the enterprise department of BT because they just see us as a threat to outsource them. Now we're a platform and they can have all the benefits of what we can provide but have to control themselves. And that's really exciting in terms of delivering brilliant outcomes for our customers.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:40:26):
So I mean that's the kind of digital services economy that we've been talking about at this event for seven years. I want to come to the audience and see if anybody has any questions for our panel, even though it's the morning after libations, I'm sure somebody Yeah, there's a couple of hands up over here, but Tony, you can see better than I can in the lights.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:40:52):
I'll do ladies first. Ray,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:40:56):
If you could state your name and where you are from before your question please.

Camille Mendler, Omdia (00:41:00):
Hi, Camille Mendler with Omdia. I would love to get a comment on what you think the word TechCo is, whether it's a good word or a bad word for the telecommunications industry.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:41:15):
Okay. Is that a term that will resonate with customers and feel like they're dealing with the kind of company that they want to be dealing with these days? Who wants to take that on or do I appoint somebody? Lasha. Okay, Lasha then Colin,

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (00:41:32):
I can take it first. I wouldn't frame it. Is it better or good in our understanding? In my understanding and VEONs understanding TechCo is a little bit very confusing for the consumers because it's kind of make a statement that we are becoming a technology company and immediately Google's and big hyperscalers are coming into mind. As I was speaking from the morning, the most important is to deliver meaningful services, whether it's B2B platform wise, applications we do or whatever. So for us, we say that we want to go and we go into the service call service delivery company. And sometimes why I personally prefer the service Co and we use it in Vion on the telecom side, sometimes we often forget and we say just we are just a pipe. But we are the biggest digital distribution channel in every country. So with success, trust, and security to the vast majority of customers. So we can scale any service and any product faster than anyone and cheaper than anyone in every country. So in my understanding, good question. I don't think we should stick with TechCo, but it's my personal opinion and opinion of my company, my group. I think we have to be more about the service delivery company, like whether these are B2B services or B.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:42:57):
Okay. Servco Colin.

Colin Wilson, Verizon Business (00:42:59):
So TechCo worries me slightly because I think tech is one of the three pillars of digital transformation and change people and process are equally important. So do I like the term TechCo I think has a place, but I'm not enamored with getting too attached to the technology piece. Focus on, to your point, the service the customer wants, which is yes, technology is a core pillar of that, but people and process are equally important. So I prefer that term. Right. Okay

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:43:30):
To you. Yes.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insights (00:43:31):
Good morning. Oops. Chris Lewis from Lewis Insight, one of the major questions that I struggle with continuously given the telco performance with customers is who represents them at the boardroom table? Because in the past, customers have never been the center of attention. We heard yesterday from Gabriela and people that yes, we are now starting to look at the demand side. What does this need to change at the board level to truly engage and truly turn the companies towards being customer focused? And part of that question also is should indeed they be dealing with the customers or should they be dealing indirect? Given a lot of the comments made on the panel that these are now modular components which go to form services which other people will be delivering. So two part if I may Ray.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:44:22):
Okay, so if I understand it, your question is about who's representing on the service provider board? Is that right?

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insights (00:44:31):
Yeah, sorry, around the boardroom table who is really fighting for the level of customer experience to be raised to compete with other companies?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:44:44):
Anybody want to take that on?

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:44:46):
Yeah, well I can have a quick go on. The first part of the question, I think it's very easy from the enterprise. I mean we run this week we had the government security advisory board having customer advisory boards from enterprises with very convincing and leaders have direct access to our board at multiple levels. And I promise you they are not shy about feedback, feedback is a blessing. And when they feel that they need us either need help or they feel that there is some coaching to be given, they give it directly and it goes directly to the board. I think where it becomes more interesting is we're really challenged on how do we get some of the brilliant outcomes that we're delivering for major enterprise and start to make it more, we're doing some extraordinary things, some things we can talk about, some things we can't, but how do we make that more addressable to small to medium business to the real horsepower that we're doing for these global multinationals and the incredible things that we're doing together to deliver outcomes. How do you make that at an affordable price point? And also to Chris's point is how do you get the small to medium businesses voices to be heard? Our CEOs, there's various methods of how they engage from that side, but for years we would sit down and also at the consumer level level, and I've had leaders in my organization, we sit down at a leadership meeting and read customer complaint letters

(00:46:27):
And that's very humbling and very sobering and it hurts sometimes, but you have to have accountability. So I think it's a really good question. I'm sure there's more than we can do, but from an enterprise in my area, we bring them in house, we help them have a say in our investments. So we lay out our options and our advisory boards will say, these are our options of where we want to place our big bets. Here's our future roadmap, how do we do it? Here's how we're transforming customer service, here's how we do it. Here's some thoughts about how we change our commercial models to pay as you go, how do you do it? And sometimes we get some really interesting surprises where we think they'd want something and actually they don't want something completely different. So that's it from the BT side

Chris Holmes, UK House of Lords (00:47:19):
On that. If I may briefly, I think while I was working a number of years ago for a major financial institution, I won't say which one it was, but it's one of four, so 25% of you in the room will be on the right lines. And we were doing a transformation program with them and it was all about this sense of how to gain better insight and have CX property stood up in the organization. So one just small thing we did, we had a board meeting in a customer's flat, so they had to come in and she had a no shoe policy. All the board had to take their shoes off at the front door, come in, sit round her kitchen table,

(00:48:03):
And she was fabulous. She was just an absolutely straightforward individual and it's a tiny thing of itself,

(00:48:10):
But sometimes you can see the world in a grain of sand and it's thinking about all of those elements of how to get close and truly understand. I suppose at the state level, there's a real question for how with the networks and with the technologies we now have, how we could truly transform that relationship if we will. Ultimate cx, how we change the relationship between citizen and state for the better and the benefit of both really in real time, what government consultations could truly mean something in this new era. It's certainly, I think it's fair to say a long way to go in terms of the thinking around this, but in terms of actualizing it entirely possible.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:49:04):
Okay, but great point Chris. And also we heard yesterday afternoon how there was a call might be around from the FinTech community for the social media platforms and telcos to get engaged in conversations around data management and maybe those calls for interaction aren't quite being met yet. Maybe that's part of this broader challenge as well. Okay. We're going to take one more question here because we've got 10 minutes left for this session and I do want to quickly get to another quick aspect before we close. But next question, if you can state your name and company please.

Francis Haysom, Appledore Research (00:49:41):
Francis Haysome Appledore Research. I noticed an interesting contrast in terms of some the narratives last year at Vion. I came away with a view that here is a company that is in healthcare, is listening to communities, is growing its financial system. Whereas a lot of the other narratives as where we have a network and we're trying desperately to find where that relevance is, it's very, very important. Is there an opportunity for telco to regard the network is incredibly important, but the needing to move on from the narrative that actually most of the rest of the world doesn't see a network. It's important to actually deliver it, but actually much more focused on what actually used the word communities. And the telco actually has ability to look forward, but it needs to be engaging with those communities. It doesn't need to be saying, here's my relevance of network or tool. I heard a positive story from VEON and I think that's something that's important that the rest of the telco could leverage. And is it for example, an aspect of that you operate in very difficult territories, Ukraine, Pakistan, et cetera, which is a very different very dynamic environment that you have to make that change. Is there something we can learn from that narrative

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:51:02):
And maybe position that if VEON for example expanded and went into and started delivering its services in very mature markets, how different would the outreach and the approach be?

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (00:51:17):
Look, that's a good question. Firstly, I would say that Ukraine, of course with the war situation now it's different, but Ukraine is a very major market in terms of all financial services or any other digital services with high level of smartphone penetration and everything. So I think the most important part here is to really understand the opportunity where you can play a game. For example, and I'll say about healthcare in Ukraine, there were several players, but we wanted with the data we had and the asks from the customers what they needed to tap into this digital vertical try and scale. There was a good comment about to try something not to always think about. Telco normally does, yeah, like eight months of business cases then six board meetings and train is away that that's the most important part. That's the DNA, how we change the culture in the company.

(00:52:20):
The same I can say for example about Kazakhstan, maybe some of you or all of you have heard about FinTech development in Kazakhstan and Kapi one of the biggest players in the region and I think one of the best players all over the world in the FinTech space as a bank. But we tapped into this business as well because we saw that there are some layers of customers who are not served from these big players. So that's how we combine digital inclusion with value creation, which at the end of the day creates the revenues and new path. So that's a good question and definitely yes, because telecom is a very strong asset with the interaction of the customers with high level of trust. We are one of the best in cybersecurity due to all the regulations throughout the decades we've done it. And as I mentioned, we are one of the best, if not the best in terms of distribution of any product and delivering this message to the customer. What well you will bring there, it's a good question. And once again my answer is if you really ask a question what matters for the customers and you find the customer community who needs some problem solving through the product, telecom has everything for this to deliver it on time valuable for the customer, and then of course making more contextual and personalized and make the revenues at the end of the day.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:53:51):
Okay. And it is interesting, I mean there are a few other companies for example in Canada looking to get into digital healthcare from that traditional telecom base, but it's still not the norm. So maybe that's something that could be explored by the broader market. Now we've only got five minutes left incredibly, and I did want to touch on very quickly specifically on opportunities in the B2B and enterprise services area. It's a massive market. We put up a slide yesterday from some research that we did that showed that there's a sense that the biggest opportunity for new revenues for service providers is in the enterprise sector, but how can this potential be tapped, especially in a growing market of sovereign services? This is really reared up as an opportunity in the past year and is becoming more so as countries look more internally, especially at data management, how can the service provider community better tap into those opportunities and are they the right kind of companies to reach out and try and meet those sovereign ai, sovereign data, sovereign cloud needs? Colin, if I could start with you.

Colin Wilson, Verizon Business (00:55:16):
So I think first and foremost the telco industry is heavily regulated. So we tend to be a risk averse group of people and moving from the eight month business case work through series of meetings, deliver something to customer, there's a cultural shift that telcos have to make more towards trial and error, doing something with particular customers. And I think we're starting to see with customers now certainly in my experience, they're far more willing to have trials and pilots are very short three month cycles to deliver some value. Where can we fit into that and how do we work with their existing ecosystems? So again, most of the large enterprise customer estate have this challenge of tech debt. There are some things they simply can't do or can't do quickly enough. How can we help them move on that journey? So yes, we definitely have a role and a capability that we can bring to bear to help those customers on that journey, no doubt about it.

(00:56:12):
I think the interesting about sovereignty, there's a role for telcos in a couple of areas there. First of all, most of us have some presence. Global telcos have some physical presence in multiple countries. So we have the opportunity to ringfence data within a sovereign area or region country. And also we control where the network passes traffic. So the path your traffic takes around the world in particular, that is very much in the hands of the telco to decide which path traffic is going to take. We can control whether it stays within or goes outside of certain geographies Where we need help, I think from the customer is identifying which data is allowed to go where. So one of the challenges we have as an industry I think is getting closer to our customer's data without infringing on privacy rights, et cetera. But understanding is this Netflix data, it doesn't really matter where it goes is this financial corporate data must stay in region. In order to do that, we need help from the customer to understand their data, their models, and then we can absolutely apply the intelligence using AI and other tools to make sure that data stays where they want it to stay. Okay,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:57:18):
Any more quick perspectives on the sovereign services and data management opportunities for telcos?

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:57:27):
I think just one very quick one is from a telco perspective that you'll have a sovereign trusted partner for sovereign cloud in each of the countries in Europe. And that's already moving ahead. It's probably more advanced than most people think that's going on behind the scenes and the regulation is only going to continue, so you're not going to necessarily see, so there's kind of one or two shots for each of the countries for the sovereign partners to set that up to get the lion's share of that perspective for the next, I'd say five years from that side. The second part I would say is as regulation continues, sovereignty up to this point is very different. In the UK they've taken a very regulation light, whereas some of the other European partners have been a lot more prescriptive on that. But what I do see in some of the pipeline, and I think Colin just mentioned it a little bit, is that regulations around sovereignty will move beyond just data at rest.

(00:58:32):
In other words is the hard drive of that server is in the country to data in motion. And that's something we started designing for that and implementing for that three years ago. And we're building like fury right now. So how do you reconcile the internet which you were referring to, which is brilliant, it's inherently able to self-heal, but it's geographically ignorant. How do you create the next version of the internet that you can inject business intent into your path control such that you can say that data in motion those flows that are required by regulation to say sovereign stay within a country and newsflash is SD WAN and overlays can't control that. You actually need the surface provider underlay to have that fine grain control in the fabric that sits underneath. And so as we move forward into the future, sovereignty will grow legs and arms from that perspective and we need to rise to the challenge.

Chris Holmes, UK House of Lords (00:59:37):
I think a build on that as well is when we start to think into the concepts of self-sovereign in terms of self-sovereign business, self-sovereign, individual worth looking at all of the principles around self-sovereign id, what that means, self-sovereign data, it becomes very interesting and I guess worth briefly saying the opportunity in the B2B space is largely down to the fact that SMEs, particularly in the UK, have been so poorly served by so many sectors of the economy that there's clearly a real opportunity there to be had. But in terms of how to codify that, I guess to finish from me think experience and only when you've thought right into that experience only then start to think operationalization, think narrative, not network. And an obvious example of that. I mean why should be it a business or a individual care less about the network? It's irrelevant.

(01:00:43):
Why should they care about the technology relevant? But if you start to make the narrative around, for example, the network with analytics put on top of it can enable an ambulance in an unbelievably crowded traffic situation to get to an RTA 10 minutes quicker than would be the case otherwise and save more lives. Well that's a compelling narrative. So think narrative, not network and think data and everything that can done with that. And the good thing, if you think experience narrative data as in mnemonic, it gives you end. And for me that is the end.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:01:24):
Well, a good point to end on there Chris. And we do have to wrap up this keynote session now, but before we do, we should check on the progress of today's viewer poll. The question for today is, which ecosystem will capture the majority of new digital service revenues by 2013 when we asked you to select an answer from our three choices? So let's have a look and see where the voting is at the moment. Okay, the ecosystem at the moment favored to capture the majority of new digital services revenues by 2030 is the hyperscalers and the OTT players with 44% of the votes followed equally by the telcos and the vertical industry platform specialists. So the hyperscalers still favored there at the moment, but early days. This poll is open for the whole of today. We'll look at updated answers later on in the day, but both polls, the one from yesterday and today are open all week.

(01:02:30):
So please do vote in that and give us a greater sense of how the industry is thinking. So we need to end here for our online audience. Please stay tuned because the discussion is going to continue on extra shot with Tony Poulos. So please send in your questions for Tony and his guests. And don't forget, please take part in today's poll, which you can find on the website for our in-room audience, the charity pinball tournament continues the coffee cart, the excellent coffee cart is back and open for business and we'll be back here on the main stage in about 30 minutes. Please, let's end by giving a round of applause to our panelists. Thank you very much. Great job.