James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to TelecomTV. I'm James Pearce, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Hisham Siblini, who's the CTIO at Ooredoo Qatar. Thank you so much for joining us today. What are your expectations from an event like Ericsson's OSS/BSS Summit?

Hisham Siblini, Ooredoo Qatar (00:20):
First of all, thank you for having me. I'm really pleased to be here. Look, as you said, this event is gathering industry leaders across the world, and I believe it's a really great opportunity to exchange on best practices on how we can evolve our BSS and OSS systems into business and strategic enablers for growth, improved customer experience, and agility.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:45):
Brilliant. So how are you evolving Ooredoo Qatar's engineering culture and governance models to move from manual intervention into AI-assisted, manager-in-the-loop oversight and eventually to fully cognitive closed loop?

Hisham Siblini, Ooredoo Qatar (01:00):
Look, our mission is very clear. We want humans to manage intent while AI manages complexity and execution. So if I take the example of today's world, our engineers are spending too much time to identify a problem, diagnose the problem and implement the solution. And this, it's a very lengthy process, and it's time-consuming, and also it's prone to errors. So our vision in the future would be that AI will identify the problem, will analyze the problem, will recommend solutions, and even for some trusted use cases, we want the AI to implement it in a closed loop. And this is really the shift that is needed in order to move from the current operating model, which is very manual, to intent-based closed-loop operations.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:56):
So if we look ahead to the future, what does the core business model for Ooredoo Qatar look like in, say, 2030? Will it be that of a traditional connectivity provider or more of a fully automated software-driven infrastructure platform?

Hisham Siblini, Ooredoo Qatar (02:11):
Look, connectivity is our core foundation, right? But the way it will be delivered is it should be software-driven, automated, and fully intent-based. So we have to move from selling connectivity to delivering outcomes, right? So for different segments, let's take the consumer segment. The consumer segment will always require a perfect digital experience, right? Businesses will require programmable networks with APIs, cloud, security, and all this with guaranteed service-level agreements. Government will ask more and more for resilience and cloud implementation. All this to be done in the country with data sovereignty, right? So our intent is to move from selling connectivity, again, to selling the outcome. Now, all this cannot be handled unless we move to software-defined, software-driven, autonomous and intelligent network-based operations.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (03:20):
Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Hisham Siblini, Ooredoo Qatar (03:22):
Thank you.