Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:04):
Hello, you are watching TelecomTV. I am Guy Daniels, and I have to say the unthinkable has just happened. That's right. We are teaming up with everyone's favorite disruptive duo. Unthinkable is coming to TelecomTV. And joining me now to explain what all this means, our Dean Bubley, Founder and Director of Disruptive Analysis, and Andrew Collinson, founder and principal of Connective Insight. Good to see you both. Again, very excited to be announcing this new partnership with you. So what is unthinkable, Andrew? What's Unthinkable? What's the objective?

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (00:43):
Unthinkable is kind of like the sign of the times. I think we're in a world that's moving incredibly quickly and in an incredibly disruptive way. We face a lot of different changes, things that happen to us and things that are opportunities. And what we felt was that we see so many people in the market struggling to change fast enough. And particularly in telecoms. I think the idea of can we change faster and unthinkable is a way of doing that. And Dean and I have had 20 years of disagreeing successfully with each other on difficult and complicated issues, and that's an incredibly useful way of exploring things and finding things out in a different way. And we started unthinkable, therefore, as a means to help people navigate faster through change. And we come up with a line lead the change, which I know Dean particularly hates, so therefore it's obviously very good. But that's what it's all about. It's about trying to adjust to change and lead change faster, whether it's a response to something in the marketplace or something new that you want to do, change is hard to do and that's what we're trying to help people get through.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:51):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you Andrew and Dean. It seems to be that this is about a proactive response to all this disruption and change we see around us.

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis (02:02):
I completely agree, and I think there's two angles here. I think that I've had a reputation as being the disruptive person in the industry for a while, as being the one who's prepared to say the quiet things out loud. And so in a way, I think sometimes the telecoms industry has things that it won't say even though it sort of inwardly knows them to be true or at least suspects them. And I also think there's another angle to this, which is around things they don't think about everyone. And not just in the telecoms industry lives in their little bubble or silo because that's their day job. But I think that increasingly telecoms lives in a multi-stakeholder world. There's a bunch of stuff that's going on quite close to it in the regulatory sphere in AI and cloud, for example. But then there's also some bigger picture stuff of what's happening with geopolitics, with trade with could be cybersecurity and risks. And I think that we need to think really some unthinkable thoughts about what happens from those spheres and how they impact on telecoms. And I think that we've hopefully created a forum where people are happy to discuss some of those unthinkable, both internal and external issues.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:19):
And so now we are here working together and hopefully we can bring unthinkable to a wider audience and scale what we can achieve together. And as a result, we're launching a dedicated channel on telecom tv and we'll be collaborating on projects starting with the AI Native Telco forum in Germany in just a few days time. Andrew, maybe I could come to you first here and ask you, what can we expect from unthinkable in Dusseldorf?

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (03:49):
Well, what we'll try and do in Dusseldorf is share with you what we learned in the unthinkable workshop that we ran. We call 'em Unthinkable labs in London earlier in the year. And what we were talking about there was telco's fit for an AI world. So the way we were thinking about it and that scenario is not how do you implement AI internally, which is what most people are focused on right now, but what are the consequences of how everybody else is using AI and thinking about AI in the world in terms of your business? So we'll be sharing some of the insights from that and also getting insights from the audience because it's a couple of months after we run that workshop. Things have other things have happened in the marketplace and we'll share some of our thoughts on that too. So what we'll be seeing in Dusseldorf is a bit of a reprise of what we've done previously, but also bringing it up to speed a bit and getting the input from the audience.

(04:43):
So it's going to be fun and it'll be slightly different in a way because what we do in our unthinkable labs is closed. It's not closed door, it's Chatham House rules. So we're not quoting what individual people say because we want people to have the freedom to say what they think and to ask the questions they want and to ask the questions we want. But what we'll be able to do is bring back a summary of that to the audience in Dorf. And that's indeed part of what we're thinking about in terms of our relationship with telecom tv. It meets a means of providing some of that input to a wider audience plan to change what we do from the lab perspective. We're going to keep that Chatham House rules so that you can get to say and think what you like in person with the people in the room. But we'll try and share the insights just to a wider audience through the telecom TV angles and the channel that we're creating with you guys.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:40):
Yeah, absolutely. I'm so looking forward to this as well. And Dean, this is obviously something that really resonates with your community, having this forum, this environment where you can freely and openly discuss what matters.

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis (05:54):
Yeah, thank you for that. There's a lot broader set of trends I'm seeing in AI at the moment, and this is one of the reasons that we ran the workshop in July in London, was this concept of an AI world where it's not just the telcos that have ai, it's their customers, both businesses and consumers, also their regulators and their investors and their suppliers and the broader landscape. And I think that sometimes some of the telecom people in the telecoms industry sometimes overlook what those other trends mean. And I see this whether it's in terms of who can deliver particular services and capabilities, which may well compete or substitute for traditional telecom ones as well, but also it has a lot of impacts on the applications that people are using. So you could touch, for example, if you have AI based compression of video that might reduce traffic on networks considerably if you have the regulator using AI to work out, if you are using your spectrum effect effectively, that has all sorts of implications as well. And then obviously from an investor point of view, this stuff that's going on in the background. So I think that understanding what an AI powered world looks like and Telco's place within that is much broader than just sort of thinking about the impact of AI in the RAN or AI and the fiber infrastructure and AI in six G and so on. It goes to the whole of society and business and consumer as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:34):
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much, Dean. There is a deeper understanding required here. Andrew, lemme turn to you. The AI Native Telco forum in Dusseldorf is just going to be the start of our collaboration. We do have a plan moving forward. What can we reveal now?

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (07:51):
Thank you guys. Well, the first couple of things that we're working on in this partnership is number one is there's an AI voice lab in London on November the sixth where we're going to explore where's the value in that and where are the opportunities in that because we think there's a lot of opportun and value which are being overlooked or at least partially looked perhaps is a better way of looking at it. And there's a lot of opportunity and indeed risk there. And that's both from a value point of view and a regulation point of view too. So there's a business and regulatory angle. We mentioned just now this idea of a holistic way of looking at things. It's so often the case that we miss perspectives by not understanding what the regulator really thinks or what the investors really think. And we misinterpret there what we've heard from other people, and that's why the multi-stakeholder part of what we do is really important.

(08:43):
So anyway, AI voice first thing. We're doing some work at the Great Telco debate. I can't say too much about that at the moment, but we know that's about sovereignty and that also includes ai. And the unthinkable lab after that is on the 15th of January, 2026 and again in London. And that's about the combination of AI MCP and network APIs because we believe that there's an opportunity for those technologies to really intertwine in interesting ways and potentially accelerate the production of value. But they're all quite complicated in their own right. And what we want to do is explore each in turn and then understand how they overlap and therefore what they might mean for each other. So that's our sort of near term map. And then in the longer term, we've got a load of other things in mind, not all necessarily ai, it happens to be a lot about AI at the moment because isn't everybody about AI at the moment, but we're trying to explore these areas which we think are quite important, but difficult question areas around AI and that involve multiple stakeholder angles.

(09:50):
So that's what our near term plan is. And as for the long term plan, we'll communicate more as we develop it, and we'd love to hear people's ideas for what they would like to see. And hearing that we've got a list of about four or five other things in our mind, but time changes and our agenda will change to some extent to reflect what happens because the world is not entirely predictable these days. And that's really the whole point of unthinkable is how do you deal better with these fast and hard changes come at you or emerge and evolve in different ways. So yes, quite a lot of things guy, some things clear in the near term and looking forward to developing a longer term agenda based on what we hear back.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:32):
Yeah, it's a very exciting program, Andrea. I'm really looking forward to it and I do anticipate our community is really going to dive into this. Dean, can you tell us a bit more about the November event, about the AI voice event?

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis (10:45):
Yeah, the AI voice event is something which I've thought about for a long time. In fact, I used to run workshops on the future of voice about 10, 15 years ago. And arguably I could say that the future is now. And what we are seeing is a fusion of voice communications, whether that's traditional phone calls or new forms of voice interaction that may be to do with iot and things like smart speakers or platforms, whether it's AI platforms or CPAs, communication platform as a service infused with AI in different ways. And we're seeing early signs of this. So for example, there's a number of operators and others that, and actually device vendors that have call screening or fraud detection and scam and spam analysis that try to make phone calls more useful. At the same time, we are seeing people start looking at putting AI agents into the call flow either to provide advice, which could be for anyone from a salesperson to someone on the buyer side, having a whisper in their ear of that sounds like a good deal.

(11:56):
Maybe you might empower a voice agent to speak on your behalf to someone or record and translate and caption a call. But there's some more advanced things that are coming out, especially if you extend voice to the idea of voice to audio. I've heard some really clever ideas about using voice, for example, voice analysis in an emergency setting to work out if someone has breathing problems or is under duress, all sorts of things that might be relevant to public safety. And then from a personal point of view, you could maybe have a detection of the sound of glass breaking together with motion sensing as an alarm in the home, or it could be sort of looking at reputation over time. Is this phone call one that I want to take? Does the person calling me have a high interruption score or should I try and shunt them off to my automated attendant? There's thousands of possible touch points between voice communications, telecoms, AI platforms, and a whole range of device and other vendors and software as a service providers. We're going to explore that again, from a multi-stakeholder point of view. There's a whole regulatory surface here as well. For example, around if you have a call from a doctor, are you allowed to record it? Are you allowed to draw inferences from it?

(13:19):
Does an AI agent have a phone number? Who knows? And I think that we're going to get as many different sorts of people in the room to try and bring out both the consumer and the business and the fixed and the mobile communications and voice and audio related trends and explore what that landscape might look like, what the opportunities are, what the risks, and the different roles of the stakeholders involved.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (13:44):
Thanks very much, Dean. Perfect timing for this, and I know that's going to be extremely popular. And Andrew, just to reiterate here, we're all determined, aren't we? To retain the essence of the in-person labs and the reports?

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (13:56):
Very much so, yes, guy. I mean, the point of the in-person activity is that it is Chatham House rules. You can say what you want, that you can if you like. Obviously we manage things like antitrust very carefully, but yes, absolutely. The point of being in the room is to meet the other people, is to hear the views, to bring the questions that you have, and it's absolutely confidential to those people in the room. And we think that's incredibly important to gain the kind of understanding and elicit the kind of responses and the depths that you need. What we're bringing to the outside of the room component of it is an analysis of that, the findings that you can take away from it and the stuff that you can share because we don't want it to be wasted. There's a lot of really great stuff in that, but to have the experience properly, you need to be there in the room.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (14:51):
Yes, well said. You do need to be in the room. So follow telecom tv, follow the unthinkable channel. We'll give you all the details as and when, but we must leave it there for now. Good talking with both of you as always, and looking forward to our ongoing collaboration, which starts in just a few days in Dusseldorf. If you are lucky enough to have tickets for the AI Native Turco forum, then we will see you at our special unthinkable breakfast workshop. If not, you can catch Dean and Andrew on our live stream of the panels and presentations. But the unthinkable briefing is not going to be recorded, and it's not going to be streamed. It's just too explosive for tv. So if you want to be part of the unthinkable briefings, click the links below this video and stay tuned for future announcements. We promise to let you know what, where, and when you need to be prepared in case the unthinkable happens. Goodbye for now.