Join Dag Peak from Alianza as he shares valuable insights on how small businesses and communications service providers (CSPs) are navigating the challenges of AI adoption. Discover how AI is revolutionizing customer service and voice services, and how Alianza is enhancing human communication with AI to create better employee experiences. Learn about the future of AI in voice networks and its potential to unlock new value through human conversations.
Diana:
Dag, it is great to be here in the FNTV studio with you here at MWC. Great to have you.
Dag Peak:
Diana, thanks for having me. It is great to be here.
Diana:
So I know that SMBs have fewer resources than large enterprises, so talk to me a little bit about what's some of the biggest challenges they face are when it comes to adopting AI and how they overcome them?
Dag Peak:
Yeah, interesting question. One thing that I think a lot of people forget, a lot of people in my industry, is that not everybody is like a... They're not a team shop. Not every small business has an IT organization that can take those geeky IT guys and go figure out what kind of AI tools that they want to use, and so that is a real challenge to adoption. But this is something that we are working on. There's this notion that I call AI for dial tone. Every business out there has a telephony service. They're getting phone service, they're getting dial tone, and what we're doing is bringing AI to those customers over telephony. We sometimes think of it as a co-pilot for telephony, and that's going to be one way that we bring AI to those businesses that don't have that kind of IT staff.
Diana:
Okay, and I know that SMBs aren't the only ones doing this. We also have CSPs who are trying to adopt AI. Talk to me a little bit about the challenges that they face when trying to implement AI across their legacy stacks.
Dag Peak:
Yeah, across their legacy stacks. Well that's exactly the point. They've built their communications networks on what's turning out to be very old infrastructure. They've got TDM switches in there, they've got legacy VoIP switches in there, and those were not designed to integrate with modern AI tech stacks, and so that's a real challenge. Operators are trying to figure out how to modernize their networks so that they can take advantage of AI. They're trying to figure out how to transform maybe to a cloud communications platform where they can take advantage of AI, but that's one thing that they absolutely need to do if they want to take advantage of today's modern AI technologies. They've got to figure out those ways that they can modernize and transform their core infrastructure to take advantage of that.
Diana:
So one of the things that we've heard when talking to folks about AI is people are worried about their jobs, so talk to me a little bit about when AI moves into customer service and other operational tasks. How does the human role evolve?
Dag Peak:
That's a tough one because a lot of businesses are looking at AI as a way to replace humans. They're taking a customer service rep that used to be a real human being answering those customer service calls and replacing it with a bot. There is a lot of that happening, but what we are really trying to do is find ways to enhance the employee experience by using AI, this idea of having a human answer a call but get coaching from an AI. You and I are sitting here in this room, two people connecting. One of the things that Alianza is really interested in is human connectedness. It's one of our core values of how we connect humans, so what we're trying to do is not necessarily replace every human being with AI. We're trying to enrich and enhance human communications with artificial intelligence, and that's absolutely one thing that I'm really excited that we're going to be bringing to market over the course of 2025.
Diana:
One might even say you're looking at AI assistance, as it were.
Dag Peak:
Very much. Augmenting and enhancing the human experience with AI.
Diana:
So I wanted to address something that you and I talked about a little bit before we started this session, and that is AI and voice services. Talk to me about how you see the role of AI evolving as it comes to voice services over the next five to 10 years.
Dag Peak:
This is going to be huge. This is going to be huge. We sat down with some senior executives at Deutsche Telekom yesterday, and they made the statement that what they're seeing is really a renaissance in voice. And I thought that was beautiful because they have spent enormous sums, huge capital investments, in building out their voice networks, and to date, they have not found a really good way to monetize the investments that they've made in those voice networks.
But here's what's changed. We have these big legacy voice networks over on this side. We have this amazing AI tech stack that's been built. We've got the hyperscalers building these giant data centers, stuffing them full of Nvidia GPUs. We've got the large language models built on top of that. And now what we have is the ability to build AI applications on top of that tech stack and blend it with traditional telco and unlock what I think is probably one of the most powerful sources of data to feed artificial intelligence that we have yet to unlock, and that is human conversation, the sorts of things that are being transmitted over phone calls. That has all just gone away in the old days, but now we can take AI and unlock the value of those conversations, and that is what really is driving this notion of a renaissance invoice.
Diana:
All right, we'll leave it there for now. Thank you so much.
Dag Peak:
All right, Diana, really good to see you.