Exploring Innovative Collaborations at Dell Technologies World 2025
In this insightful discussion, we explore the collaboration between AT&T and H2O.ai, featuring Jennifer Berquist and Sri Ambati. Alongside them is Savannah Peterson, Principal Analyst and Host from SiliconANGLE Media Inc., at Dell Technologies World 2025. They explore Total Access Orchestration, emphasizing its transformative potential across industries.
Jennifer Berquist of AT&T and Sri Ambati of H2O.ai discuss the exciting synergies between their companies, focusing on avant-garde artificial intelligence (AI) solutions tailored for AT&T’s global clientele. With insights from theCUBE Research and our video hosts, they underscore their expertise in AI-driven initiatives, illustrating the power of collaboration in fostering innovation.
Key takeaways include AT&T's efforts to make advanced AI accessible to small and medium businesses, leveraging their expansive infrastructure. Ambati notes that this partnership not only empowers businesses through AI but also facilitates life-saving solutions such as those used in domestic abuse hotline services. The conversation highlights the potential for AI to drive both economic and societal benefits, according to insights shared by industry analysts.
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Jennifer Berquist, AT&T & Sri Ambati, H2O.ai | Roving Reporter
Exploring Innovative Collaborations at Dell Technologies World 2025
In this insightful discussion, we explore the collaboration between AT&T and H2O.ai, featuring Jennifer Berquist and Sri Ambati. Alongside them is Savannah Peterson, Principal Analyst and Host from SiliconANGLE Media Inc., at Dell Technologies World 2025. They explore Total Access Orchestration, emphasizing its transformative potential across industries.
Jennifer Berquist of AT&T and Sri Ambati of H2O.ai discuss the exciting synergies between their companies, focusing on avant-garde artificial intelligence (AI) solutions tailored for AT&T’s global clientele. With insights from theCUBE Research and our video hosts, they underscore their expertise in AI-driven initiatives, illustrating the power of collaboration in fostering innovation.
Key takeaways include AT&T's efforts to make advanced AI accessible to small and medium businesses, leveraging their expansive infrastructure. Ambati notes that this partnership not only empowers businesses through AI but also facilitates life-saving solutions such as those used in domestic abuse hotline services. The conversation highlights the potential for AI to drive both economic and societal benefits, according to insights shared by industry analysts.
.ai
Jennifer Berquist, AT&T & Sri Ambati, H2O.ai | Roving Reporter
Jennifer Berquist
Director, TAO Platform, AT&T Chief Technology OfficeAT&T
Sri Ambati
Founder & CEOH2O.ai
Jennifer Berquist, director of the TAO platform, AT&T Chief Technology Office, at AT&T, and Sri Ambati, chief executive officer and co-founder of H2O.ai, join theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson at Dell Technologies World 2025 to explore the impact of their collaboration on AI accessibility and societal innovation. Their conversation centers on AT&T’s Total Access Orchestration initiative and its potential to transform industries.
Berquist shares how AT&T is leveraging its global infrastructure to bring advanced AI to small and medium businesses, enabling more...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What are the details of the collaboration between AT&T and Sri, including the platform T-A-O and the support for gen and agentic AI solutions for AT&T customers?add
What is an example of how implementing agentic AI with sentiment analysis and natural language processing can improve the efficiency of routing critical calls in contact centers and domestic abuse hotlines?add
What are the benefits of democratizing AI for small and medium business owners?add
What is the approach being taken to build completely packaged AI as a service solutions for customers?add
Jennifer Berquist, AT&T & Sri Ambati, H2O.ai | Roving Reporter
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Savannah Peterson
>> Good afternoon nerd fam, and welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson. Very excited to be bringing you this exclusive interview with our friends at AT&T and H2O.ai. Sri and Jen, thank you so much for taking the time. Busy week, I know, but this story is worth telling. Sri's a regular visitor here on the show. So Jen, I'm going to start with you.
Jennifer Berquist
>> All right.
Savannah Peterson
>> Tell me a little bit about what you're working on at AT&T and how you ended up collaborating with Sri.
Jennifer Berquist
>> I know you're a member of the Sri Fan Club.
Savannah Peterson
>> Definitely.
Jennifer Berquist
>> So am I. So my platform, my run is called T-A-O, TAO, for Total Access Orchestration, or as Sri has told me, we're now going to be also be TAO-Agentic Orchestration.
Savannah Peterson
>> I love this branding on the fly right here.
Jennifer Berquist
>> I know, I know. He's full of full great ideas.
Savannah Peterson
>> He is.
Jennifer Berquist
>> So, our platform has always supported network voice and cloud connectivity solutions for AT&T. And of course, now we're supporting gen and agentic AI solutions as well. And that's where Sri and I have gotten to collaborate on how we're going to go to market with solutions for our AT&T customers.
Savannah Peterson
>> That's awesome. Sri, tell me a little bit about this pass there. Tell me about this partnership, what you're able to provide for them. I know you're excited about this partnership and this is our second AT&T chat. So, I'm curious to see what's so thrilling about Jen.
Jennifer Berquist
>> So last time we spoke at GTC and we talked about how we're saving billions of dollars for AT&T as a business and-
Savannah Peterson
>> Wild metrics in that interview. If y'all haven't watched that one, you definitely need to watch that after this one. Yes.
Sri Ambati
>> Absolutely. Every dollar spent makes multiple dollars for-
Savannah Peterson
>> Wild....
Sri Ambati
>> the... And so contact center, call center, how did we use large language models to distill and fine tune a small language model. So call center use cases, ask data use cases, so so many fraud prevention use cases. And how to match customers with the right products. All of that use cases are so powerful for AT&T that we decided, how can we partner with AT&T to take it to their customers? And every small medium business which doesn't have the superstars that AT&T has, how can we now bring that together on a compute and a distributed platform which is accessible to them at their venues on their premises?
Savannah Peterson
>> Which is amazing. And you're working together in countries all around the world, right?
Jennifer Berquist
>> Yes, .
Sri Ambati
>> 28 nodes, so TAO is in 28 countries-
Savannah Peterson
>> Wow....
Sri Ambati
>> and is able to deploy with remarkable speed, AI as a service. The other thing that's happening here is AT&T, the maker of originally Bell Labs, the maker of C language, the maker of all the innovation we have known, information theory from Shannon, all of this led to the great company called AT&T. They built all the fiber, very asset heavy. Right?
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah.
Sri Ambati
>> So, how do we make AT&T be asset light? How do we give them the revenue on top of the stack? And that's kind of, how do we use the leverage, the incredible data center, the central offices across the board and start making them really revenue generators? AI is an asset, and how do you make revenue from your data and your AI is going to be the journey ahead. And we talked about this at MWC where we thought that telcos will now rise up the stack, become digital infracos. TAO is the first example of how AT&T can spin off an incredible service. And not just sell GPUs as a service or data centers as a service, but go up the stack and become an AI superpower themselves.
Savannah Peterson
>> I love the term you used there, Sri, of levitating or lifting up. Because I think when people think about adopting new technology or upgrading, you're thinking about a weight in terms of cost, in terms of compute, in terms of a lot of different things that can weigh on that transaction, or even upscaling your community to go do this. With y'all working together, AT&T customers now and in the future, are going to have an outstanding solution that's going to grow with them.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Absolutely. Absolutely.
Savannah Peterson
>> Which is pretty powerful.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Absolutely. We're lowering the barrier to entry for our customers, getting them into the game. They don't know where to start with AI. They can't make huge capital investments. So with our partnership and the fact that we've already invested in all of that hardware, all of that infrastructure, all of that fiber, we can get them up and running.
Savannah Peterson
>> You've done a lot of heavy lifting and to get you ready for this moment.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Exactly.
Savannah Peterson
>> And it makes sense that this is why you're working together. I love that Sri has a tradition for always bringing me a story about AI for good on the show. And you were doing some very powerful work.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you.
Savannah Peterson
>> Tell me about the domestic abuse hotline.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Yes. So we have provided contact center agent services on the TAO platform for contact centers and for domestic abuse hotlines for, gosh, it's been four or five years now. So when we got to talking to Sri last night, we said, "You know what, we actually have an opportunity together to take this to the next level. If we implement agentic AI with sentiment analysis and the ability to do natural language processing, we can actually route those calls, the most urgent and critical calls, faster to the right call center agent."
Savannah Peterson
>> This is potentially life-saving.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Yes, absolutely.
Savannah Peterson
>> And so powerful.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Absolutely.
Savannah Peterson
>> And this is an example of something that's good, but something that can also be replicated across different industries, different verticals.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Oh, absolutely. It's applicable to a number of industries. It's applicable to a number of verticals. It's something that honestly, we can generate real revenue with and meet our customer's needs. But for the domestic violence abuse hotline, we don't charge any money for that.
Savannah Peterson
>> I love that though. That's important.
Jennifer Berquist
>> We've provided those services gratis.
Savannah Peterson
>> I just want to ask you internally at AT&T, what's the conversation like around that? How do you determine which things you are going to be able to offer for free, or what causes your passionate about supporting with your technology?
Jennifer Berquist
>> We've had a long history at AT&T of being there for our customers and being there for the community. So our community engagement factor is super high. And so it's easy to bring to the business, to our leaders, "Hey, these are things that we just have to do because it's the right thing to do." Right?
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah.
Jennifer Berquist
>> And we have, because of our engagement with the federal government, our relationship with FirstNet and our support of that network, we have facilities to do that in ways that not everybody does. So, that's a burden of responsibility to deliver to those who need it the most.
Savannah Peterson
>> Absolutely. I love it. And congratulations on doing that. Thank you-
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you....
Savannah Peterson
>> for doing that. Thank both of you for doing that. Sri, I got a question for you next. So, this has got to be fun for you. I know how passionate you are about doing the right things and using this for good. And our personal ethics are very aligned, you and I. When you're picking your partners to work with like AT&T, how do you filter for if they're going to be on the level of Sri good when it comes to doing good for the world?
Sri Ambati
>> I was selling that to Jen yesterday, people who are happy naturally attract goodness around them as well. There's a divinity in people that you see them very happy.
Savannah Peterson
>> It's a great point. It's a really good point.
Sri Ambati
>> You know that like... And then that's actually the first, the chemistry. You're two partners going into a journey. You don't know the ups and downs, so you want to be there with someone you know is going to be there, you trust, build trust quickly. And building one on the other, like the TAO Agentic orchestration that was designed because Jen had a break in her talk. She had three breaks in her talk, which is go out brainstorm. That was a great way to bring cross-company cultures. And we are here at Dell. Dell was there helping us, NVIDIA. So, Dell, NVIDIA, a host of partner ecosystem. We want to raise a forest, not just a tree, so you need to try a lot. And some will fail if you're not failing, we are not trying hard enough. So the bringing that kind of a wide spectrum of reach across AT&T, because within AT&T there's so many competing projects that are running around. And so, how do you just spread a hundred seeds and maybe a dozen of them will take off. And I think that's the kind of mindset of investing into the partnership. And what we found with AT&T specifically is there's so much data, there's so much great talent, and there's so much desire at the highest level. When John Stankey talks about AI, he's talking about, how can first go to Maui faster and prevent fire disasters? So, FirstNet is a customer of both of us. It's a powerful way to save lives, use AI to... AI has the potential to make the world better. AI has the potential to also accelerate the inequity that we have today, unfortunately. Right?
Savannah Peterson
>> Yes, it does.
Sri Ambati
>> So, my vision is to create a million billionaires. And that vision for AI, including-
Savannah Peterson
>> Love this. Did not know this was one of your visions. This is a fun ad to this interview.
Sri Ambati
>> And also by the way, side note, the world needs more women billionaires.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yes, it does, baby.
Sri Ambati
>> To break the equity barrier.
Savannah Peterson
>> We're on it. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Sri Ambati
>> While there's all this discussion about things, the way to bring equity is to create abundance. And AI can bring that abundance. It's not a zero-sum game. And while the people try to think about us versus open source, us versus that, I think the bigger picture here is intelligence will put light where there's darkness, and up-level the entire game for the whole human race. And it's our time to kind of nudge AI moment to do good. And to do that continuously, even if it's very small, inch by inch, we want to direct this high-speed, high-velocity transformation that's happening towards the greater good of the people, greater good of the planet. And I think that's possible with strong superpowers like MiAT&T, the T symbol was the top 10 stocks for a very long time, decades ago.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yes, it was. I'm an AT&T customer myself right now.
Sri Ambati
>> to bring-
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you. .
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, my pleasure. Y'all have always been great.
Sri Ambati
>> Our vision is always been great to bring that back where a lot of this excitement around innovation that was there in the telcos and banks of course, to now start using them to become the force multipliers for high-speed innovators like ours. We are the world's most accurate agentic AI, which we announced at your last interview. Now bringing that into TAO, we can now start verticalizing all these agents and co-creating with the customers. And solve simple problems whether for fraud prevention or scoring a lead better, or creating better content. Helping associates sell better in stores, helping companies treat their makers better, their employees better. Instead of all of that inward outward and innovation-wise, all three use cases for every small, medium business we can now offer through this joint partnership.
Savannah Peterson
>> I'm just sitting over here smiling because it makes so much sense, because I mean AT&T is literally everywhere. Millions of customers and you're best in breed, best in class. And so combining forces, there's so many awesome things that you can do. I mean, the possibilities are truly infinite. So I got to ask, what are you all working on deploying next? Go for it, Jen.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you. Thank you. So right now, we are working together on deploying some agents that can be used for small and medium business. Yes. We're trying to go... There's been a lot of focus on, what are we doing in the enterprise? But we think that the small and medium business is an underserved market. And so,-
Savannah Peterson
>> Preach. Louder for the folks in the back. And you know what those small to medium businesses become, eventually? Enterprises sometimes.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Yes, they do.
Savannah Peterson
>> You ignore them when they're small, they're not going to remember that.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Exactly.
Savannah Peterson
>> They remember that.That's a big deal.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Exactly. So what we're doing is we're offering to them, again, we want to democratize AI so that they can consume it and they can reap those benefits. The small, medium business owner has a lot to do, right?
Savannah Peterson
>> And they're stressed and don't always have the resources to go figure out how to learn and up-skill. And having partners or community members like you-
Jennifer Berquist
>> Exactly....
Savannah Peterson
>> can totally change that game, and de-inflate, I guess is word I would use, the anxiety. Because I think when you're, as a small business owner myself, you're nervous when you're in those environments to make a decision, because that could shut down your business.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Absolutely.
Savannah Peterson
>> You don't have the venture capital or the operating capital that some of these businesses do. And so, being able to come in there and say, "Hey."
Jennifer Berquist
>> Yes.
Savannah Peterson
>> So, what types of things are you building for them?
Jennifer Berquist
>> So, what we're doing is we're taking the power of TAO plus the power of H2O.ai plus AT&T's connectivity and we are building completely packaged AI as a service solutions. So, the customer has everything in one package. We can go to market and price it in a way that is immediately available to them. They can pay by the drink, they can have an all-you-can-eat consumption package. They can buy this the way that they want to, and consume it in a way that makes sense for their business.
Savannah Peterson
>> It's so thoughtful by design. Sri, did you want to add on there ?
Jennifer Berquist
>> I was going to say that there are 3,000 banks, small, medium banks in America, which don't necessarily have all the fraud prevention or financial crime or cyber risk protection agents today. They don't have document processing technologies, they get faxes even today W2's come in fax, all of that lending that the big banks have. We saw J.P. Morgan talk about how they're using AI across every sphere. How can a small, medium bank get to that same level of competitiveness when trying to offer those services? And I think that's where this is really going to play out, is if we can take some other simple ask questions on your customer base. Ask questions around who's your most high-net-worth person on a credit union? Those kinds of topics are very hard to deliver. They don't have the CIOs who can roll out AI. They don't want to upload their data because of regulatory reasons into a ChatGPT, so that's why they need Dell and then AT&T and H2O. So, that air gap... And they can't spend a lot of money either. So you got to have efficient AI, and they don't have billions dollars to spend. So, they have to get it almost pre-packaged solution so that it's a verticalized agent.
Savannah Peterson
>> It makes so much sense. And those community banks, it lets them do what they're great at, which is being kind to their community members and the folks who bank there. And personalizing that service for them rather than wasting time on all the less sexy parts of banking, for example, are those .
Jennifer Berquist
>> Right. Absolutely.
Savannah Peterson
>> Makes a ton of sense. I absolutely love it. Sri and Jen, this has been a joy. I cannot wait to continue to follow the story. Thank you both for all the hard work you do both on the free side, on the domestic abuse side. They are changing lives, and all the future lives you're going to save with everything else that's going on.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you.
Savannah Peterson
>> And for being one of the largest companies in the world, but still looking out for the little guy.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you.
Savannah Peterson
>> Main Street appreciates that.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yes.
Jennifer Berquist
>> Thank you. We appreciate you.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah. Always a pleasure to be here with you both. Yeah, go for it, Sri.
Sri Ambati
>> Thank you, Savannah. I was going to say the effort, good angle, especially domestic violence . It only increased after COVID and so we want to definitely bring attention to that. Mental health is a side effect of domestic abuse. I think that's a problem we saw before in a bank in Sydney. And so, one of Jen's team members is in Sydney, Peter, and so he was brainstorming. He heard about that when they opened source, that model AI TD with CBA. And I think this would be a fantastic way to use AI to make our families better, our communities better. And then from there, we can make our countries and the world better. Yeah, thank you.
Savannah Peterson
>> You're absolutely right, Sri. I'm glad you added that in. People talk about doing things for good, but y'all are actually doing it. There's a big difference between the doers and the talkers. And this is very much-
Sri Ambati
>> Still a lot to do. Still a lot to do.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, yeah. We all got a lot of hard work to do, but I'm glad we get to do it together. And I can't wait to continue telling these stories. Thank you guys for taking time. Highlight of my day, y'all. I hope you're as inspired as I am after that fantastic interview with Sri and Jen. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada at Dell Tech World. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.
Savannah Peterson