James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to TelecomTV. I'm James Pearce. I'm in Vienna for Network X, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Natali Delić, who is the Chief Strategy and Digital Officer at Telekom Srbija. Thank you so much for joining us today. Let's talk about AI, because that's a hot topic here this week. What role can AI play in creating new opportunities and revenue streams for operators?

Natali Delić, Telekom Srbija (00:27):
Very big role, and I think that we need to look at it from several perspectives. Of course, we are all talking about using AI to improve our efficiency in network operations. This conference is about that quite a lot. But then in customer experience, in how we are serving customers, in our logistics, in our sales, everywhere, we can use AI to improve efficiency and productivity in all parts of the company. But creating this efficiency on its own does not mean that we will see it in our P&L. It does not mean that it will have real economic value for the companies, and I think that that is the important thing. We need to learn how to use this capacity that is freed to transform our companies and to really create value for the company. So this is one layer.

(01:27):
The second one is, while we are learning how to use and apply AI, we are really creating a huge opportunity to apply this knowledge and understanding for so many other companies that do not have resources to build this knowledge themselves. We are building our agentic AI platforms. We have our AI infrastructure, maybe something in the cloud, something, of course, because of inference and the local edge, costs and latency needs to be on-premise or at least in the country. And that is how we are learning how to apply AI in a very governed way and in an economic way, because we can decide where to send AI requests. We understand how to secure everything. And I think that this is a very good knowledge that can be applied to offer services to B2B customers, to the enterprise segment. So to go beyond just AI infrastructure as a service, but to really offer services and help companies use AI in a similar way like telcos are doing it now.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (02:41):
I think that's really interesting what you were saying about how operators are learning the lessons from AI and then helping teach them to businesses. But a key part is also how AI is driven within the operators itself. So should a reorganisation of a business's culture be top-down, bottom-up, or somewhere in the middle?

Natali Delić, Telekom Srbija (03:01):
Definitely, the change needs to happen everywhere in the organisation. But if I need to say where it needs to start, I think that it needs to start from leadership. I think that leadership and top-down, you need to get clarity in what we want to achieve in the company through AI. Because AI can do so much, and there are thousands of ideas, and ideas are, in a way, cheap. But it does not mean that every idea is worth spending time on and that every idea will, at the end, create some positive business outcome. And I think that that is why leadership needs to decide where we want to apply AI. What is the most important for us? In some areas, it might be cost. In some areas, it might be customer experience. In some areas, it might be new revenues. So you can apply it in different parts of the organisation, but it has to be top-down.

(03:59):
On the other side, bottom-up, those who are working in the processes who are operational know reality. Senior management sometimes does not really see all the details of the work. And people working know what are the exceptions, what are the policies, what can work, what cannot work. So they need to understand AI enough, and you need to teach them enough so that they can actually apply this AI in business processes and work alongside AI. But then we come to the third part, which is probably the most critical, and that is the middle layer, like you mentioned. Middle layer and managers who are the ones whose work will change the most because they now need to go from supervising and delegating activities to actually redesigning the flows and managing something that we are calling human-AI teams. And they need to know which part of the job can be done by AI, and how handoff to humans is happening and when it's happening.

(05:02):
An they need to know which information and data are used in this process. So it requires deep knowledge of processes. And sometimes, in many companies, this knowledge does not reside in the heads of middle management, but in the heads of the biggest expert in the team. So I think that the change will happen. In that management layer, change will definitely be big. Big, significant, and will require complete redesign of organisations and processes in the company. So AI is, in my opinion, disrupting the organisations as we know it. And what will be the next type of organisations we will see.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (05:53):
Because that's the point, right? It's about what comes next as well. You've talked about the switch from using AI to actually running on AI. What advice would you give for those looking to build a company that actually operates on AI, so has AI at its core?

Natali Delić, Telekom Srbija (06:09):
Very good question. Because there are too many companies I see that are measuring the success of application of AI in their companies by number of use cases, number of tools, and I think that that is wrong. Because the only thing that really matters is whether we are creating some business outcome that we defined, whether we can translate freed capacity to some business value, cost, revenue, customer experience, whatever the company needs. And I think that that is the first advice I would give. You need to think about business outcomes and where it makes sense to apply AI and not just chase number of AIs. So we need to learn how to properly measure, apply proper metrics to AI applications so that we can have that business outcome. You need to not forget data and AI governance because many companies see that as administrative functions, but data and AI governance are foundational elements of AI.

(07:29):
Everything will stumble if this is not good enough. So this is something, the second advice that I would give. And the third is, you will invest a lot in technology because you need to invest. This is new technology. We are all investing in AI. But we cannot forget to invest in people because we need people to know how to operate and how to govern AI, and who will need to learn how to work alongside AI and to extract the biggest value from this technology. So investing in people is still required. Don't forget it.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (08:01):
I think that ties it all together so nicely. Thank you so much for joining us today on TelecomTV.

Natali Delić, Telekom Srbija (08:06):
Thank you for inviting me.