Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:05):
You are watching Telecom tv. We are joining from Future Network 2024 in London. Now I'm delighted to be joined by Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Global Head of Digital and Zero Touch Operations at Vodafone. Hi Mabel. Thank you for joining us today.

Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Vodafone (00:20):
Hi, thank you for inviting me here.

Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:22):
So first tell us more about your role at Vodafone.

Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Vodafone (00:24):
I'm part of the networks team in Vodafone. So I have the digital and zero touch operations within network operations. We have a vertical looking at autonomous networks for operations, working with the other verticals to see how we get into the right autonomous network level. So we do that across our footprint. So it's a vertical group function that we do that across our European market.

Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:53):
And so automation I assume is growing in importance for Vodafone. Can you share more about your challenges and your goals in terms of automating the network?

Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Vodafone (01:03):
Okay, so let me start with the goals and then we come to the challenges afterwards. So in Vodafone, our goal is to reach towards what we call zero touch operation as much as automation as possible. And you might have heard of the level of autonomy. We believe that different areas and domains will have a different level of autonomy and we're looking at how we can make autonomous networks both for the fix as well as the mobile technologies. Our goal is to reach zero touch operations across our technologies, across the different domains as well. The access, the dashboard, the core, the services domain, and across our footprint.

(01:51):
In addition to that, one of the goals to get into the enablers for that are very much related to the technologies that you bring. And we heard today a lot about those enablers, the data, the ai, the genis, but also the software development and whole networks serving towards software development. But the other super important part is the people and the processes. So it is super important that we actually change the way that we do things. We upskill our teams to be able to bring with the new technologies, autonomous networks, and bring autonomous networks in the legacy technologies as well. And then least but not last is the processes. So we're seeing with the new technologies like SDN 5G SA open ran, a lot of autonomous comes embedded with a lot of continuous integration and continuous deployment part of it. So super ascension that we also change our processes and the way that we do technology and with that goal.

(02:59):
So our goal is to create a networks of the futures by bringing our autonomous levels towards zero touch. And the challenges we see, again, very much related to the pillars that I just mentioned, technology, we see a lot of really, really good progress both from the network as well as on the IT domains with gen ai. So we don't see that as a main challenge. Data quality is one of them, but also we see the challenge, the culture effect. So how we bring our organization along to make that change. So digital is a transformation and this is what I will say one of our main challenges as an industry.

Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (03:52):
You mentioned data quality. How do you try to make the data as clean as possible and to get the best actionable insights based on that?

Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Vodafone (04:01):
So we have a very strong strategy and we partnered with Google to build the data data and to make sure that we have all the data for the different markets in a commonplace.

(04:17):
What we see is that there is areas where the data is more rated and the quality is higher, the areas that we need to enhance the data, at least the areas where we probably haven't used the data before and we haven't experimented with the data. So we see that it's both is an education to us to make sure that the people who insert data, who use data, keep data clean, but also we see new technologies that help us to make sure that we purify data in that aspect. So it's both in terms of how do we ourself use the data and make it relevant and better quality as well as how we use technologies to do that porion and clean the quality of those setting. Taking pictures, we were talking earlier on inventory for telco is one of the key areas where data is not that purify and how we can take different data in broad to make sure that the data quality gets better.

Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (05:33):
And so how would you monetize the data going forward? Once it is clean and of great quality.

Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Vodafone (05:40):
We see different aspects. So one of the key things that we see is that it is super essential that we use the data internally, that we use it to do the things to improve our customer performance, to do better efficiency. And we have already experimented that in our areas internally and now we're in a position to also monetize that. So to help our enterprise or to put a disposition of our users data that will help them to have a better service or in the case of enterprises to create new areas of business for them. So I will say we're looking at both internally, how we create those products and then how we can expose those process to our partners customers to monetize that data. In the IO Ts space, we see with some of the enterprises in healthcare, in logistics, the data is quite valuable for them to manage their business and to simplify their business, but also to offer to the ultimate cost to add if they're doing B two, B2C, all that files.

Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (06:59):
That's all very interesting. Thank you for joining us.

Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Vodafone (07:02):
Thank you.