James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to TelecomTV. I'm James Pearce, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Jason Keane from Ericsson. Thank you so much for joining us. Jason, from your perspective, where is the next wave of opportunity for CSPs to generate new revenues, and how are vendors like Ericsson preparing to help them grab this opportunity?

Jason Keane, Ericsson (00:23):
Well, that's a really good question, James. Actually, what I've noticed - a theme coming in these events was there's been so much focus on OPEX. How can we use automation and tools to reduce our cost line, which of course improves the bottom line, but really the opportunity to unlock is how we grow our top line. I think the two can't be separated. So for us, what we see today is we need a solid, robust cost line in place or operational expenses in place so it doesn't grow. But where we see the new opportunity coming in is new revenue lines in things like monetizing AI. Very simplistically, if uplink is growing, do we charge for uplink? But actually I see some rather more exciting use cases coming in where operators can say that basically we'll provide inferencing services for end users. And they might ask how they're going to compete with maybe the hyper cloud providers or the Anthropics or the OpenAIs? They don't have to compete directly, they can provide near real-time local computation services, AI computation services. Things like that are demonstrating the possibility of new revenues for our customers. It's all very nascent, but it's quite exciting. And the dialogue we've had in customer meetings is not just about controlling the cost line, the OpEx, but also maybe we have an opportunity to grow. So it's being explored.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:39):
That's really interesting. Now, there's been a lot of hype around autonomous networks. What are the key things that CSPs can do to make sure they succeed in their own autonomous journeys?

Jason Keane, Ericsson (01:48):
So it's constantly coming up in customer dialogue and the major trends we see, and it's not really shifted in the last year or so, is that you really need good data. And data itself isn't just about being good data and making sense, which is critical, but one of the major questions is trustworthy data. Can we actually trust that data is accurate? If you don't have trustworthy data, then you're operating against something that doesn't behave. So many dialogues we're having is how can we ensure that the data we get is good and we should act on it? One of the other things coming with data is in a kind of a bizarre twist. The fact that data is siloed today, it's somewhat secure. As soon as you start connecting dots between data, you actually expose yourself from a security perspective and the chief security officers are kind of going, "I'm not so sure if we should do this." I understand where they're coming from because you're just exposing how to maybe have an attack on your network. Not in a bad way, but you're actually exposing the data itself. So what we see now is people are looking at what the exact data need is. How do I protect it? How can I be custodian of it? How can I ensure that the data I need to get to my agents and my AI is useful and would give me a good output? So really in the last year it's been about data, but we've matured our thinking on what that data could look like. The answer isn't agentic everything. The answer is get good data and find the right answer and the right data for what you need to do.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (03:06):
As enterprise demand grows for services such as private 5G, mobile edge computing, or stringent SLAs, how does closed-loop autonomy shift BSS capabilities from traditional reactive billing to real-time dynamic service assurance?

Jason Keane, Ericsson (03:22):
Yeah, I had an interesting conversation about the current commercial economics of the business. And if you look - this is with a customer from North America - basically saying it's incredible, the mobile phone, your service, it's a critical service, and yet you're only willing to pay maybe $30 a month for it. And if you have an outage, you will scream, "Where's my mobile phone?" Yet maybe you'll pay lots more money for your favourite film subscription. So somehow we misrepresented the value of what mobile comms is. With enterprises, you can actually sell an SLA. So one of the major things is: I will ensure your connectivity for X amount a month. We shouldn't make it $30 - we should actually charge for that. Of course, what autonomous networks give you is that closed loop, because unless you close the loop, detect and fix an issue that comes up, you will breach that SLA - which costs you when you can't sell it. So I think there's an opportunity in autonomous networks when you close the loop to actually monetize it. And it should be something the customers or operators put a lot of money into ensuring their network is resilient. This is one opportunity to capitalize on, particularly for enterprises, because when you buy an enterprise service, you want the service you pay for.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (04:34):
Brilliant, Jason. Thank you for joining us today.

Jason Keane, Ericsson (04:36):
Thank you.