MWC25 | theCUBE Insights with Zeus Kerravala

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Zeus Kerravala

Founder & Principal Analyst

ZK Research

play_circle_outline Challenges and potential opportunities for telcos in adopting AI and physical AI.

play_circle_outline Importance of agile infrastructure for telcos to keep up with industry trends.

play_circle_outline Telcos need to modernize infrastructure to capitalize on AI opportunities.

play_circle_outline Potential threats to telcos from cloud providers and hyperscalers in selling services.

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theCUBE Insights with Zeus Kerravala

Zeus Kerravala

Founder & Principal Analyst ZK Research

Join us for an insightful episode of theCUBE Insights with Zeus Kerravala, the founder of ZK Research, as he shares his expertise at MWC25 Barcelona. Kerravala discusses the emerging opportunities and challenges facing telcos in the era of AI, emphasizing the critical role of network evolution. Interviewed by theCUBE analysts Dave Vellante and Bob Laliberte, the conversation provides a deep dive into industry trends and strategic responses.

Key insights include Kerravala's perspective on the significance of infrastructure modernization for telcos to ... Read more

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What is the big question surrounding telcos and their ability to capitalize on the opportunities presented by AI, specifically in terms of monetizing physical AI? add

What challenges do telcos face in capitalizing on AI and monetizing it, especially in terms of infrastructure and historical success in revenue generation outside of connectivity? add

What is the motivation for companies to modernize and go full software in order to monetize? add

What do organizations need to do in order to modernize their infrastructure and move towards microservices-based, cloud-native applications? add

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Bob Laliberte. Savannah Peterson is walking the floor, checking out all the innovations. We're super excited to have Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research back on theCUBE. It's been a while, my friend. Good to see you.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, it's been a while. How you guys been doing?

Dave Vellante

>> Good, good, good. We've been traveling around. I mean, yeah, it was ... I think last year was the last time we ran into each other.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I think so, yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> I've driven through your hometown a couple of times and thought about you.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> New restaurant around the corner. We're going to have to check it out.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, you're going to have to come say hi.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, definitely. So how are you doing, man? What's happening here at MWC? What are you seeing that's exciting?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. Well, it's exhausting.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, yeah. A lot of walking.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I will say, I do feel like there's a renewed sense of energy from the telcos. I think they all recognize now that AI does present a big opportunity for them as well. I think the network plays a really important role. I don't think Wall Street understands that yet, frankly. From a capital market perspective, everyone's still focused on the GPU and the compute stack, but the network does play an important role. In fact, I was thinking back to the Jensen keynote at CES where he talked about the next phase of AI being physical AI, where everything that moves would eventually be autonomous. When you think about the implications of that, we got connected, everything coming, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> And so, I'm not sure there's ever been a better opportunity to be a telco. However, I'm also not sure that they've got the right infrastructure in place to give them the agility to be able to make the moves they want to move to do to be able to capitalize on AI. So that's the big question, is-

Dave Vellante

>> So let's assume for a second, and then I want to come back to the infrastructure blocker that you just mentioned. Well, let's assume for a second you take that away. Will they be able to monetize that physical AI? Because historically they really haven't had much success other than the connectivity. But maybe this is different.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. Well, that's a good question. In fact, when you talk to the telcos here about transformation, one of the things they tell you is that we're looking at revenue-generating services, cutting costs, blah, blah, blah. Then at the end of the day, all their initiatives are around cutting costs. I was at a little Cisco press event last night with a partnership with Jio and Nokia. The COO from Jio, who's a mobile operator in India, said that ... I think it was two years ago, they were getting 50 bucks per gig for bandwidth. Now they're getting like 50 cents. It's like orders of magnitude difference. So there's this race. Can I cut costs faster than my fees are going down?

Dave Vellante

>> .

Zeus Kerravala

>> And the answer is it's been a losing race. And so, I think, Dave, one of the big myths of this event is that there's new revenue-generating services coming, because I ask about it every year, nobody seems to have any answers other than we need to do it. But the one thing I can tell you is if they don't transform their infrastructure to something that's more agile, they're never going to be able to keep up and change fast enough before somebody else comes in and just intermediates something like the cloud providers did with cloud.

Dave Vellante

>> So, Bob, let's talk about that.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. No, I was just going to say just wait for 6G. That's going to solve it.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, yeah. Well, I saw 6G in one of the stands here.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. Actually there's been really no talk of 6G here. Everyone is still talking about 5G and how do they still monetize that.

Dave Vellante

>> And the lack of monetization .

Bob Laliberte

>> Lack of monetization of it. I think what you had started off with saying is that transition to the physical AI. I think there's really ... And the telcos are looking at that as an opportunity of how do we capitalize on this AI movement? We've got 5G. They've settled in on fixed wireless access is one of the things that they're trying to drive. We had some people on today earlier that were talking about fixed wireless access that they have and so forth and what they're doing, the autonomous physical piece. We had someone on today that was talking about they have autonomous buoys in the sea to set up races, and they'll actually move based on wind autonomously.

Dave Vellante

>> Huh.

Bob Laliberte

>> So we're starting to get to that phase where they do it, but that's all over a private network. So ostensibly these telcos need to figure out how to leverage what they've got in their environment, how to leverage 5G, how to leverage the backbones to be able to enable. We're starting to see signs of it like a Verizon AI Connect. They're starting to realize that all of this AI is going to require massive amounts of data movement. And so, how can they somehow capitalize and monetize on that?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, the other place they can capitalize is the data itself. This is where the mobile operators, frankly, have been a bunch of knuckleheads. I was talking to this one hospital and actually a stadium owner, same conversation, and they were saying, "We would just like it if Verizon would give us basic handset information as to who's on our network and they can't even do that." And so, if they're looking for a way to monetize what they do, there's lots of insights in the data they could sell, but they haven't figured out a way to extract it and package it in a way that they can cash in on that, right?

Dave Vellante

>> So if they're not monetizing 5G ... And, by the way, just a tangent, 5G was supposed to completely change our experience.

Bob Laliberte

>> Right.

Dave Vellante

>> I don't feel like it has.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I don't think so either. Well, we're using more bandwidth for the apps that we have.

Dave Vellante

>> I always said 5G is going to be the same as always. We're going to use more bandwidth. There's going to be more rich applications, and the performance is not going to be any better. But if we try to do what we're doing now in the old networks, it would be worse. So it's just keeping us afloat. Is that an accurate description of what's going on, or is there more to come with 5G?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, I think ... And here's where the promise of 5G hasn't lived up. I think it was supposed to be this ultra-reliable connectivity that's going to let us connect more things in different industries. 5G in private cellular even has been very popular, manufacturing, warehousing, mining, but those are the verticals that have always adopted that stuff. We haven't seen an expansion of cellular into other industries, right, expanding the footprint.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> That's been, I guess, the big miss from 5G.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. Well, I think a lot of the promise of 5G was all based on millimeter wave. We're going to have ultra-high speeds, ultra-reliable, but, oh, wait, it can't go through a tree. It can't go around a building.

Dave Vellante

>> Right, yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> So we've had to shift the frequencies that we're using for 5G, which do give it better performance, but it's not that millimeter wave type capability. So is it better than 4G? Absolutely. Is it what everyone thought it was going to be at the get-go? Probably not.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, Dave's point is right. We have more bandwidth-intensive apps. So more bandwidth-intensive apps on 5G is the same as a less bandwidth-intensive app on 4G.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, we're doing all this AI now, and if we try to do an ad on 4G, it would've been just a horrible experience. So I mean I'll give him a pass on that, but it certainly hasn't lived up to his promises. My question to both of you guys is if the telcos haven't been able to monetize 5G and they put in all this CapEx, what's their motivation to modernize their infrastructure? Is it like they're damned if they don't, but if they do, is there gold at the end of the rainbow?

Zeus Kerravala

>> I think they're only partially damned if they do, and they're really damned if they don't is what it comes down to.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay.

Zeus Kerravala

>> But I think they've never really modernized the point where they've got an end-to-end cloud platform from core to RAN where they have the agility to be able to take advantage of whatever trend is coming. I do worry that they're going to miss AI and being able to create new services around that, but I do sense here that there is ... In fact, even at Cisco Live EMEA, Oliver Tuszik, the head of EMEA for Cisco, said he has seen more spend out of the telcos today in Europe because of that. And so, they do know they need to modernize. In fact, I was just at a ... It was a little startup called DriveNets based out of Israel, at their event. They had AT&T, Cox, Orange there. I asked the question, "What are the new services you're looking to monetize?" and the AT&T person said, "I can't tell you that. But what I can tell you is if we don't modernize and we don't go full software, we're never going to be able to monetize." And so, I think that's the motivation today, is to put the foundation in place so as these trends happen, they can capitalize on them, which they've never been ... They've always been one step behind-

Dave Vellante

>> They know they're screwed, yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, and that's the problem with telco. I mean I was here-

Zeus Kerravala

>> They all want to be techcos now too, right?

Bob Laliberte

>> But 10 years ago, they were just at the point where they were trying to get off physical appliances and move to software. So when you talk about technology and industries, the telco space has always trailed industry and what's going on. So that was 10 years ago when VMware was bloom, where everything was virtualized, and everything in the telco space was still software on an appliance. And so, they were just beginning to make that transition to software. So they're trying to catch up, they're trying to do it faster, but they really need to accelerate their modernization and go to these cloud-based so they can become more agile, more nimble, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Well-

Zeus Kerravala

>> I think they are getting some help too from the equipment guys. The event I was talking about last night, the press event was Cisco, Nokia, and AMD in partnership with Jio. What the COO of Jio said was there's no one vendor that provides their infrastructure. And so, they run ecosystems, and they need the ecosystem vendors to work together where historically they haven't. They've all tried to live in their silos and own everything, and that's not really worked. And so, I do think the equipment manufacturers are now listening at least and trying to be more ecosystem-based.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> And to your point about software-defined, when we saw the whole NFV big thud, that just didn't happen. But now we're at a real turning point. I mean it is an imperative. So do you think ... It sounds like you do. It sounds like think that AI is going to be that catalyst to make these guys move.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. Well, I think it has to be. I mean I think everybody you talk to says AI is the biggest transition that we're going to go through in our lifetimes, and the world's going to look significantly different on the back end of the transition. And so, they either modernize and capitalize on it or not, and someone else is going to take advantage of that because it's not-

Bob Laliberte

>> Well-...

Zeus Kerravala

>> a given they're going to own selling connectivity, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Well, the question is too-

Zeus Kerravala

>> -...

Dave Vellante

>> they could lose that foothold.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah-

Dave Vellante

>> Wait, wait, explain that.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, I just think there's other ways to buy it. I mean you could go all mobile and drop your wireline altogether. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility-

Bob Laliberte

>> Satellite....

Zeus Kerravala

>> that the cloud providers-

Dave Vellante

>> They could get Skyped.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, I mean-

Dave Vellante

>> Even though Microsoft's shutting down Skype.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I mean Amazon sells private wireless and-

Dave Vellante

>> , yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that the cloud providers, the hyperscalers, getting to sell their own services.

Bob Laliberte

>> Hyperscalers have great backbone networks, right?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, yeah. So I mean there are threats there. So that's been a monopoly a long time.

Bob Laliberte

>> I mean if you can create that network environment in a cloud and then deploy it against the physical assets that you already have, whether it'd be a colo provider, a cloud provider, et cetera, there's potential there. So there's still obviously ... With the mobile, there are physical assets that are needed. But what really needs to happen is these organizations really need to modernize. They need to move to these microservices-based, cloud-based, cloud-native type of applications.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, they'll admit they move slow. Nobody moves slower than telcos, but it's because their infrastructure's so manly intensive. So if they can modernize, then at least there's the opportunity to move faster.

Bob Laliberte

>> Faster.

Dave Vellante

>> So you started this saying it might be a good investment opportunity, but you just basically talked that down. Why is this a good investment area? Is it for the providers selling to the service providers or the technology company selling to providers?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Oh, you mean from a capital market perspective?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. Well, so someone in the network ecosystem is going to win.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I do think the equipment manufacturers, they're the arms dealers and they're going to sell to whoever and whoever wants to move.

Dave Vellante

>> So who's in the best position?

Zeus Kerravala

>> I think Cisco's actually in the best position I've seen in maybe 20 years, actually. The CTO of one of the European operators said to me this is the best telco portfolio they've had in a decade and it's the most they've listened to them in a decade. I think Juniper is, too. I think they've rebuilt their service provider portfolio. I think a really interesting dark horse in the telco space too is Arista. They've never really approached that, but if you can serve the needs of the hyperscalers, I don't see why you couldn't pivot that way, too.

Dave Vellante

>> So those are kind of the big three.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, I'm not fully convinced of the Ericssons and the Nokias. I think they've got ... Their stuff's really low margin, and that to me seems easier to disrupt than the core backbones.

Dave Vellante

>> So I missed the Chuck roundtable. You guys are both there, right, for the Chuck roundtable?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> What was that like? What's your takeaways?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Chuck was pretty frank. I think-

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, he always is.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. I think the big seminal change in Cisco, frankly, I know you had him on your show, is Jeetu becoming the chief product officer, right?

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> He was there in the meeting, I presume, right?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, he was. The rebuilding of the Cisco stack, UCS on top of network with security embedded. Chuck admitted that they never really had anybody in product that was willing to look at how to put all that together before.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Jeetu's a really good product guy, and I think that's a little under-

Dave Vellante

>> But wasn't that Goeckeler's job?

Zeus Kerravala

>> It was Goeckeler's job. It was Jon Davidson's job. It's been a lot of people's job, but nobody's owned ... In some ways-

Dave Vellante

>> The entire portfolio.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. In some ways-

Dave Vellante

>> Well, Goeckeler kind of did.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, he owned networking and security, I think, but he didn't own-

Dave Vellante

>> Collab.

Bob Laliberte

>> Security and .

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, he never owned telco, right? And so-

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, that's right.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Yes, right.

Zeus Kerravala

>> So I think from that perspective, they do have the right guy in place now and-

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, because he's got no history. He's got no bond to anything. So he looks at it objectively and says, "How do we put together the best solutions?" What we've seen since July is just a ton of innovation, a ton of integration that's going on across the entire portfolio.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Look at the behavior difference in Cisco, too. So, historically, they never really pre-announced products. Chuck was talking about that this morning. He said, "We announced AI Defense way before it was going to be available. We announced Hypershield way before it's going to be available," and he said, historically, they never did that because if you don't deliver, then you look bad. And so, now I think because Jeetu's running product, he's got the confidence to go out the industry and say, "We're going to deliver AI Defense on this day," and he knows it's coming. I'll tell you something. Jeetu is going to make sure that the day they say it's available, it's available.

Dave Vellante

>> Any other takeaways from that meeting?

Bob Laliberte

>> No, I think that was it. I mean the big things were ... Obviously, we talked about telco and we talked about the innovation cycle. It's been really-

Zeus Kerravala

>> I do think that the renewed confidence in the telcos in Cisco is important. I told Chuck, I said, "I think your ... " In fact, I wrote this in SiliconANGLE yesterday that Cisco and service providers have historically been like Ben Affleck and J.Lo. They're off, they're on, they're off, they're on. They seem to be in an upcycle now, but now they've got to make sure they keep it there.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> So it's interesting. So Cisco-

Zeus Kerravala

>> I mean the stock's at a 25-year high, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. $250 billion valuation. It hasn't surpassed its '99 valuation yet. March 2000.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. Well, that's crazy, though.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, it's not that far away. Stock was just under 80. It's a 63 now. It sounds like it's a shot to getting back there.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I do think that. In fact, I think if they can execute on AI properly, I think you could see their market cap really go from there. The big thing for them, Dave, and everyone in the management talked about this, their big needle-lock moving opportunity is security. I think this is a case where ... In fact, if you look ... I don't know if you saw the report Cisco put out about DeepSeek and how 100% of the times they tried to breach it, they did.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I thought they missed the point of that whole report. While DeepSeek was breached 100% of the time, Llama was 96%, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Nobody on that chart-

Dave Vellante

>> No, nobody was doing that.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. And so, if the model providers aren't going to provide the security, who is? Well, Cisco has rebuilt their portfolio to embed enforcement across the network. I think they have the opportunity to redefine security for the AI era as something that's embedded in the network. Not an overlay, not something that you drop point products in, but actually an embedded network service. So no matter what I do from a model perspective, I can pick and choose, move them in, move them out. I know I'm going to be secure.

Dave Vellante

>> And they've been talking about that for a while. I mean Jonathan talked about that, Jeetu talked about that when they were separate kings.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. Well, now they've got the product to do it. I think the 9300-

Bob Laliberte

>> Its launch was-...

Zeus Kerravala

>> with the embedded DPU gives them the capability to run a lot of security services on board.

Dave Vellante

>> Why did Cisco make that management change?

Zeus Kerravala

>> The Davidson to Jeetu?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, I think ... And I'll premise, I like Jon. He's a good guy.

Dave Vellante

>> We all did.

Zeus Kerravala

>> But he's not ... I don't-

Dave Vellante

>> We all do. He's still alive.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, yeah. I don't think he's the businessman that Jeetu is. I think also Jon had been at Cisco a long time, and I think he had a lot of loyalties to the product groups and things like that. And so, did Todd. That's really a problem Cisco's had over the years is people grew up in these-

Dave Vellante

>> Todd Nightingale.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> People grew up in these silos and with certain products and they maintain loyalties to it, where the one thing they didn't say about Jeetu is he's not there to win popularity contests. He is there to build good products, and he's really the first really good product guy the company's had.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Coming back to telcos, I met a company this week called e&. Do you know e&? They're like the UAE telco.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Oh, okay.

Dave Vellante

>> They have a core connectivity business, telco business. They have a Netflix competitor, they have a grocer arm, they have a financial services arm. They're monetizing all of those. It sounded like Hock Tan's running the place.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> They all have separate P&Ls. They're a profitable company. And so, I thought that was an interesting example of a telco that has succeeded in monetizing. They've got a global business.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, that's a good question. Why didn't Verizon buy Uber or DoorDash or something? They've all had the opportunity to, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, yeah. So I guess there's hope.

Bob Laliberte

>> In certain cases they've tried, right? Who did AT&T buy? Was it one of the-

Dave Vellante

>> Well, that's the thing. You're right, Bobby.

Bob Laliberte

>> Was it Paramount or whoever it was, I think?

Dave Vellante

>> They tried to get into that content business in a big way, but they failed. It almost felt like it's not in their DNA. But maybe some of these disruptors, I don't know, Dish. I'm not really that high on Dish, but maybe you guys are higher. But-

Bob Laliberte

>> Like a Rakuten or something like that.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well, what about SpaceX?

Bob Laliberte

>> SpaceX?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Something like that, right? Or-

Dave Vellante

>> Or AWS.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> AWS, Starlink.

Dave Vellante

>> Hyper.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. So I mean there's no reason that's not your telco in the future, is it?

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, that's what you guys were alluding to before.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah, yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Wow. So these guys are really ... In a way, they got these great opportunities, but they're vulnerable to guys who have massive CapEx capabilities, although they're pouring it into AI. I don't know if the hyperscalers are ... I guess they are putting some into the network as well, for sure. Google, certainly.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Well-

Bob Laliberte

>> They've got to put it into the network, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> Because everything is distributed. So the data all being generated at the edge coming in.

Dave Vellante

>> What do you know about the hyperscalers' network strategies? What can you tell us about-

Bob Laliberte

>> I know that-...

Dave Vellante

>> what they're doing and covers?

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. I mean from all the time that I've worked with them, they've gotten massive pipes connecting up their data centers. And so, when you think about all this data that needs to be moved, they're in a really good position to take advantage and be able to offer services to leverage that backbone. When you get all that dark fiber, you just want traffic running over.

Dave Vellante

>> Google certainly talks about it, .

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. Well, they use it primarily for their customers. "I'm going to lower your ingress costs. I'm going to lower your egress costs. I'm going to make transport across our network cheaper for you." There's no reason you can't spin that around and make it a connectivity service stuff. I mean-

Bob Laliberte

>> Right, and a high-performance one. It's not the internet, right?

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> So that's the big thing is get it off the internet-

Zeus Kerravala

>> Right now they're very telco-friendly. They buy a lot of services from them. They wholesale from them and stuff. But once you run into a runway, partners become competitors. If it comes down to that, I think the Vegas odds would be on the hyperscaler more than on the telco.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, Danielle Royston ... I guess she's Rios now. Danielle Rios, formerly known as Danielle Royston, her whole thing was cloudify the network. At the same time, when you talk to the telcos, they're a little bit reticent to go to the cloud because of the reasons you guys are mentioning. The cloud could eat them alive.

Zeus Kerravala

>> But they also don't have the people to run their own network as a private cloud. So that's where the whole telco cloud play from the hyperscalers comes from.

Dave Vellante

>> But I mean the telcos do have a core skillset. They do know how to run networks reliably. They do have that last-mile connectivity.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah. It's interesting too that with agentic AI all being voice-based, I actually think we're going to see a resurgence of voice as well, because a lot of ... Remember Chambers is talking about video being the new voice?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> I think voice becomes the new text. The reason we use so many text-based services and browsers and stuff is because IVRs and stuff stink, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, it's horrible.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yup.

Zeus Kerravala

>> But now with agentic AI, it can understand natural language, you can interrupt it, it can pivot. Now if you want to change a flight, why not just talk to your app instead of typing it in?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Zeus Kerravala

>> And so-

Dave Vellante

>> I have great conversations with my AI.

Zeus Kerravala

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> I do. It's-

Zeus Kerravala

>> So that puts a premium on security, reliability, uptime, all the things that telcos are good at. They've just got to make sure that they're in a position to capitalize on it when people want it, right?

Bob Laliberte

>> Yup.

Dave Vellante

>> Great. Guys, awesome analysis as usual. Really appreciate your time, Zeus, Bob. Thank you. Okay, this is Dave Vellante for Bob Laliberte and Zeus Kerravala and Savannah Peterson, who's out checking up all the innovations. This wraps up day two from MWC 2025 in Barcelona. We're at the Fira. We'll be here tomorrow and Thursday. Tune in to theCUBE.net. Go to siliconANGLE.com where you see some great articles from people like Zeus and our whole team over there. Check out thecuberesearch.com. Don't forget, go to thecubeai.com, thecubeai.com, and ask us some questions. That's our RAG-based chatbot. All Cube data, all SiliconANGLE. Check that out. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you next time.