Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:16):
Hi, I'm Tony Poulos and I'm at the DSP Leaders World Forum in Windsor and today it's the last extra shot of the event. And with me, I have a number of hot shots to help me out. Firstly, Ray Le Maistre, then Guy Daniels and James Pearce, our whole editorial team is here and hopefully we'll get something sensible this year because last year we did generate slightly near the end, but we are tired. We've had a very big week. Tell me, Ray, what was the highlight for you this week? What stood out? One of the sessions that did stand out for you?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:51):
I mean, goodness, picking one out of that is tough, but I think we started off the two days with a session on how telcos can move forward from testing trials, POCs to take AI into their commercial operations and actually start to make use of it rather than just testing and trialling. And we heard some great examples and also some great advice from Philippe at Orange about what the telcos need to focus on. He gave three things and he said he's only seen two out of the three. I'll let people watch the on-demand session rather than repeat what he said, but he gave some great insight based on Orange's experience of what it's required to move from that POC stage to actual commercial deployment of AI.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:42):
Guy,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:43):
For you?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:44):
Oh, I just wish we'd talked about AI. AI was everywhere, Tony. Every session, I don't think there's a single session where AI wasn't mentioned. For me, I think it's what does it mean to be a DSP? And we started this journey in 2019 CSP to DSP. It's changed a bit and it's been interesting to hear and how AI is weaving its way in there. We'll talk about AI native networks and native organisations now, but we still had two really good vertical market sessions. They were absolutely top.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:17):
I'm going to come back to those in a moment. James, you were sitting in the audience through the whole thing, poor fellow. How did you end up? What stood out for you?

James Pearce, TelecomTV (02:25):
Well, I mean, those market sessions were great. As I said, we're going to come back to that one second. I think the panel on culture was really, really interesting because one of the things that sometimes goes amiss is it's an industry that's full of people. It's driven by people. So we get bogged down in the technology and we all love tech. It's super interesting, but sometimes if you don't have the right people enacting that change, then the industry just won't change and it needs to change. That's one of my big takeaways from the entire week. But without getting it not just being... So man, there's a tendency to either make it top down change or bottom up and you need to have both to kind of meet in the middle, I guess.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:02):
It seems every time we talk about AI, we hear people talking about reducing headcount and AI is going to solve all these problems and things like that. But it's part of the culture is critical. Even to introduce AI, I think a couple of the speakers highlighted we have to get the support of everybody in the company to actually use the AI to realise what the benefits of it are.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:21):
A few times, Tony, and James has just mentioned the culture session there, but it's not only that one. It's so many times we've heard about it's not just top down direction, it's bottom up. And as Ahmed said in the final session, it's meeting in the middle and that gets everyone's buy-in.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (03:36):
And I think if you take that slightly further as well, you look a lot at the kind of stats around AI usage in a lot of companies, whether it's enterprises or whether it's telcos. And you've got a lot of people using small instances of AI across the kind of lower levels where they're using it on practical day-to-day things like spell checks and things like that. Or you have these really big projects where people are going, "Oh, we need to do this." And there's just not that middle ground of how the people who are on the ground who are operating are seeing the benefits of those big projects or how the executives understand exactly how their workforce are using it. So I thought that was really interesting. It was coming from.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:12):
I thought so too. Neil McCrae hit it home for me when he got up and said the industry is lacking confidence in itself and people don't have confidence in our telecoms industry at the moment. I got really worried about that. Do you think that's valid and how are we going to remedy that? What do you think, Ray?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:28):
I think it is very valid. Neil is pretty much outspoken on nearly every topic you can think of, but it's hard to... You can't argue with him. He's coming from a lot of experience and I think he makes a great point here. At the end of the couple of years of really bad years of COVID, all of a sudden the telecom sector's star was shining bright. Everybody suddenly realised, oh, without the telecom operators, the world industry would've stopped essentially, but that's almost seen as history. Absolutely forgotten. And I think he makes a great point that maybe this industry doesn't shout loud enough about how important it is and the roles that it plays, but I think he was equally right in that it's been preyed upon I think by other parties that have tried to tell the industry, "You can't do it correctly. We can do it for you," and have taken some of the control away.

(05:39):
And I think that we're hearing, although Neil doesn't like the phrase techcos, because he says- He doesn't like it at all. Yeah. We are seeing a change in the way that telecom operators work and generating their own software often now using, well, nearly always now using AI, that's a real shift in the way they're operating and it is giving more control back and it is creating more IP out of the telcos and a creation of more patents that are being put forward as well. So I think we are seeing that shift, but yeah, I think it's right about confidence levels as well.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (06:18):
The other thing that I got excited to get again this year about as I did last year was the people talk about the vehicle industry and its reliance now with the connected car and the requirements on the networks to help them out and how they're trying to cope with networks that don't have full coverage, how they cope with cars being exported to other countries. I didn't realise just how much is involved and how integrated we are as industries. Did that stick with you at all, Guy?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:44):
Yeah, I'm becoming more integrated as we move towards software-defined vehicles and they're saying, "Well, we don't need to rebuild that one model across 20 different geographical regions or individual countries. We're going to have this one model of 150 plus countries. We're just going to make the changes in software." So you need the connectivity and it's not all about just LiDAR data being transmitted. That misses the point entirely, but I'm just so pleased that for the second year now, we've done our own little small bit in helping these two industries come together and talk because it's really apparent that not enough of that goes on. We need to understand each other and that goes back. I'm sorry to bring him up again, but Neil McCrae's his session, he said exactly the same thing. We need to talk to these industries. James?

James Pearce, TelecomTV (07:31):
I think what's really interesting as well, we had two industry sessions, right? One on the connected cars, connected vehicles, and one on financial services and the attitudes and the conversations were completely different in you're talking about vehicles and it's very well integrated. We're already on the way there and going a lot further. Well, financial services, it was a lot about the challenges of integration. It's like how they're using each other, how the industries talk to each other and some of the difficulties. And I think it shows that telco plays such a vital role in so many industries and you could expand this out to others as well and yet the relationship sometimes, it varies quite a lot depending on what the industry is. So it shows that as an industry, we need to work better on how we communicate with other industries as well, which I think was one of the big takeaways from the panel today about financial services.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:18):
Yeah. I just want to make another point there. I think Laszlo from Veon who co-hosted the finance session made a great point. He said one of the commonalities between finance and the telecom sector is that both were basically both very arrogant industries and that came a cropper as a result of that. And I think although Neil made a great point in that the telecom sector needs to refine its confidence, I think there was a point where it was perhaps too confident and arrogant and that led to some of the resulting issues that he was pointing out. And I think Laszlo is right in saying that. And I genuinely think we're not going to have that level of arrogance again because all of that business that the telco sector was arrogant about has gone away now pretty much.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:08):
Well, I can't be too arrogant in saying that we've got to finish up now because we've reached our time and to mention that out of the connected car session, when I heard that each car is connected by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, internet, and the cellular network is that I'm not going to say rude things about other drivers anymore while I'm driving. And I want you all to think about that. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being with us today and let's look forward to next year's leaders, DSP Leaders Summit. Thank you.