Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
So we're at DTW 24 Ignite in Copenhagen. It's the TM Forum's annual show. I'm here with Fabio Cerone. He is the head of telco for EMEA at Amazon Web Services, AWS. Fabio. Great to meet you. Thanks very much for joining us today. Thank

Fabio Cerone, AWS (00:21):
You for having me. Pleasure.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:23):
So the show has been going on for a couple of days here. You have a great presence here up on the balcony at this event. The biggest space I think for any company at the show, and obviously a lot of visitors and a lot of partners here as well. Now, what are the key trends that you've heard about that people are talking about at this show and what is AWS offering to the people that are coming to see you? Yeah,

Fabio Cerone, AWS (00:48):
You see, I think DTW is here is another great opportunity, great moment to acknowledge the compelling moment we are in as an industry. And not a surprise, everything is about generative ai. And so what I really felt in this days is the acknowledgement that actually this technology is putting us in a place where the pace innovation is even higher than what we can absorb. And so the key thing that I hear about is the need to partner to succeed. If you want to solve real customer problems, there is a clear willingness and commitment from different customers and partners to partner together. I will make some examples. So this morning I was with Amdocs and they delivered an amazing demonstration about how a coding body enabled by generative ai, we call it Amazon queue, can help them to reduce the cost and lead time to modernize applications to move to cloud.

(01:59):
And this is not new, just in continuation with the clear trend. We started with British Telecom a couple of months ago. You might have seen the announcement and if you look at the numbers, essentially it's amazing. So British Telecom, in three months, they onboarded 1200 software engineers. They produced 100,000 lines of code automatically through Amazon queue with a 37% of accepted code. First time, kind of 12% increase in productivity. There are some demos there, then we can go together. But this is a first concrete example about what kind of content generative AI can deliver to telco players. To do what? To do automation in software coding. Amazing. There are other examples that you can see around with Ericsson, for instance, where they're building a telco LM train on us on AWS. And your story is to train that LLM on the huge information base that they have from their network to make network troubleshooting and resolution automatic through a simple chat box. And the other example that I would call out is with T-Mobile and in this case about run optimization radio access network optimization. Again through generative AI that in this case the content that is produced is optimization of radio access network. Again, it's a strong improvement in terms of productivity, but again, the key theme that I see around is let's partner together. The problems are pretty clear, the solution is pretty clear. The technology underlying technology can be fairly complex and that's why super important to cooperate.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:56):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, partnerships and collaboration have been talked about for years, but now you can clearly see evidence of this happening and the results of that as well. So in the industry, so you mentioned a couple of instances there of how Genai is sort of helping to shape and change the market and improve productivity, but it seems that there's a lot of potential use cases. Are there a lot that are specific to the telecom sector, would you say?

Fabio Cerone, AWS (04:27):
I would say there is some specificity to the Teleco domain and then there is a huge potential which is just transversal to different industries. We can make some examples, right? One typical example is about how do we reinvent the customer interaction, the customer experience, the customer care. And so if you think about the legacy contact center where you call, Hey, I have a problem, they are telco, my line doesn't work so well. And then you need to go through six or seven iterations to the IVR and after 10 minutes, no one is answering yourself. Now the way a generative AI contact center can revolutionize the end customer experience is just mind blowing. So you need to think about the new general based contact center, like a navigator for you. So imagine if you're driving in the streets of Rome, you would love to have a navigator that drives you into your end direction.

(05:31):
Now the gene AI based contact center for an agent who need to answer question is exactly like a navigator because essentially provides all the good answers based on a huge information base that the content that the content center, the made content center made, makes available to the agent. Just an example. And we have done some massive projects, couple of examples in the telco dish, US and VMO two in uk. I think that's a great example of that. The other example that I would put forward is you have heard about the gene AI global Telco alliance, so SKT, DOS telecom, Isla, they're building a telco LM for a simple reason that they see a huge advantage in building an LLM, which takes telco specific information to build a number of use cases. And again, it's all about automation of the network, network configuration, network troubleshooting, and the end game will be autonomous network.

(06:43):
We have been doing many steps towards autonomous driving. Genetic AI will be a fundamental enabled for autonomous networks. And then you can think about players like the Erickson, the Nokia, the Samsung of the world. All of them are in a path where they want to infuse generative AI to make DUR software more usable and more efficient to make sure that their r and d is more productive. And again, the example that I made before about Amazon queue is just an example about how generic AI can deliver a content that in that case is software coding, helping the network, the developers, software developers focusing on something else with higher value. So again, it's a mix of industry specific use cases and lemme say horizontal use cases that are about improving the customer experience, improving the employee efficiency, and making the industry more innovative overall. Okay.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:56):
So obviously a great deal of chat about AI and gen AI specifically at this event, but are there any other industry trends that you've been hearing about or that people have been talking about with AWS?

Fabio Cerone, AWS (08:09):
Sure. I would call out a couple of cases. Yeah. The first one is about the announcement that Teleo went out yesterday morning, which is a kind of really mind blowing. So Teleo announced that they will partner with us with AWS to improve their digital sovereign posture in the Nordics, leveraging AWS digital sovereign Cloud by design. What does this mean essentially is that we will deploy AWS cloud infrastructure in a state-of-the-art data center that they're building out of Oslo, and they will position themselves as the key player to fulfill the regulatory requirements on digital sovereignty. That is one piece that is absolutely in line with our strategy to play a key role helping Europe to modernize digital transformation, being compliant with the regulations ready to digital sovereignty. You might have heard that we will invest 7.8 billion in the next few years in Germany to build the European Sovereign Cloud, which is a total independent partition of cloud, and this will generate 2,800 jobs in Germany to build and operate this brand new nature.

(09:36):
Lenor will leverage this value proposition and this is one clear trend. The other clear trend is about cloudification of the network. So one month and a half ago we announced with Telefonica, Germany that they will deploy 5G core standalone on AWS based on a mix of AWS region in Frankfurt and outpost deployment in their data centers. Now, the problem that they wanted to solve is pretty clear. They wanted to have a much higher automation in the way they develop, they deploy and they operate the network with a clear CICD pipeline where we inject our technology in this case together with Nokia to make sure that the level automation is much higher and they use the elasticity of the cloud at base. If you look at the journey, it took more than two years of intense validation and testing and failure and success. But the moment that you go live with 5G core in the cloud in accounting like Germany, I think this is an historic milestone much more to come. The plan there is to deploy the 5G core for initial phase, for a standalone part for 1 million subscribers and then take it forward. I think there is an economic example about how after the massive IT migration in the cloud, now we are starting the journey for network cloudification on AWS cloud.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:17):
I think it's also an example and it was talked about here today, about how the telecom operators need to be bold in their choices and their decisions. And I think Malik Rao at Telefonica Deutschland is one of those people who's prepared to take the next step and be a leader. So it's, it's

Fabio Cerone, AWS (11:38):
Absolutely true. I'm used to say that you need to identify and work with key change agents, people who want to play the insurgent role. Now, Malik Kra, as you said, has been my partner in crime for almost five years now, and he has been bold since the very beginning. He was used to say, if we move web application into the cloud, this is not where we will gain. We need to move our core business into the cloud. And he did it with this step. Essentially, he showed the work as a change agent can really play the role to invent the way you build something that for years has been built in a very legacy way and really leverage the advantages that the cloud can bring to you. To your point, change agents make history and start new trends. Malik, for sure is one of those.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:32):
Absolutely. Okay. Fantastic to hear the trends in the industry and what AWS is doing. So Fabio, thanks so much for joining us today. Great to talk to you.

Fabio Cerone, AWS (12:40):
Thank you so much. Pleasure to be with you.