[0:06]The signal beyond the signal, a story about Telco's evolution. Once upon a time, the hum of connection defined progress. Every text, every call, every ping, powered by invisible networks stretching across cities, oceans, and mountains. Telcos were the architects of the connected age. They built the towers, laid the cables, and carried the dreams of billions through waves and wires. But over time, people stopped noticing the signal. They expected it like air, like water, like light. Connectivity became a commodity, a utility, not a differentiator. Then came the turning point. AI, IoT, 5G, and cloud became the new frontiers. Enterprises stopped asking, who gives me the best coverage. They began asking, who helps me orchestrate my future? Telcos stood as guardians of the world's most powerful infrastructure, yet trapped by legacy systems and shrinking margins. This was their crisis of relevance, but also their moment of rebirth. The Telcos that thrived looked beyond the towers. They saw the future wasn't about connection, it was about orchestration. Not just delivering bandwidth, but delivering confidence. Because by 2035, the world won't remember who had the fastest signal, but who used that signal to build something greater. And so, the story continues. In every fiber, every connection, and every idea, the Telcos are becoming the orchestrators of a new digital symphony.
[2:00]Hello, and thank you for joining us in this, in this webinar. And I don't know if you were all able to, to listen to, to the videos we repeated it three times, but it's so important the concepts that they're speaking and they're, we're telling in this video because this is what's really happening in the, in the Telco industry. Telcos know that they're, they have to fight against being or converting themselves in a commodity and for that they have to change and this change is happening right now. I have been in many Telcos, in different parts of of the world, and the same change is happening in all. Let me go forward and, and introduce myself and uh Juanma, uh Juan Manuel Garcia. Juanma has more than 25 years of experience in the in the Telco industry. He has been in a series of different vendors and uh different companies that give services to the, the Telco and actually is the industry advisor at Salesforce for the region in in all in all Telco matters. And my name is Nicolas Howard. I am the Managing Director of Nespon. I also have more than 20 years of experience in, in working in Telcos. I've worked for a Telco and now I've been working the past five years with Nespon in, in, in this, in this matter. who's Nespon? Nespon is a company, is a global company. We have offices in about 10 cities in, in different parts of of the world. We're based uh our headquarters are based in in Dallas, Texas, but then we have uh our, our offices are also in Latam, uh Argentina, Uruguay, uh Colombia, Mexico, uh Santiago, Chile, and then we also have our offices in Madrid, where I'm based and we've opened offices in in the UAE, and we have two development centers in India and and Pakistan.
[4:09]It was founded by Umer Fazal in 2008, and our President is uh Shama, uh that's here, here today with him also hearing us. We've been recognized as a Summit Partner, that's a very important category of partners in for Salesforce. And our differentiation is that we have more than 300 collaborators that work with us. uh We have more than 800 certifications in in uh in Salesforce and basically our DNA is Telco. We've worked with many Telcos around this, these regions, uh Latam, uh United States, uh Europe, and now we're working also in Arpac and uh the UAE, and we have a lot of a lot of experience with this. But with no further explanation about Nespon, I want to share now our, I want to pass the hand on to Juanma that's going to tell you a little about how the Telco, uh companies are evolving and what's the new future that they're going to, they're going to have and how Salesforce is helping us to transit this, this path. So, on to you Juanma. Thank you, Nicolas. Hi everyone. Uh, thank you for being here today. So, let me start. In Salesforce our vision since 1999 has not changed, which is connect with our customers in a whole with your customers in a whole new way. This is intact. It continues to be our vision, primary vision, and it's been a 26-year journey of growth and innovation, which has seen how the technology has been moving forward and evolving again and again and again. And last year, in 2024, we something disruptive happened, the rise of uh Generative AI, LLMs providing us as consumers and individuals, humans, amazing tools that makes our lives easier and makes us things more enjoyable. But, uh, I thought here, do we have the same level of tools in our enterprises, or are we still facing a significant divide between customers and enterprises? Uh, we've seen that in enterprises becoming more difficult to, not just ask and get an answer, but get an answer in the context of our industry, in the context of our business, business processes, and everything that we are doing. So, last year, Salesforce introduced Agentforce, and as you can see, it's an amazing journey. It's going very fast, faster than ever. With already 12,000 of our customers embraced this journey with Agentforce AI, and it's been evolving through this year and a half, through different versions, from Agentforce, first version, Agentforce 2, 2dx and Agentforce 3, and today, we are ready to the Agentforce Enterprise Journey. So, welcome to the Agentforce Enterprise journey, or revolution, which opens an incredible world of technology, which elevates us and elevates our industries and organizations, where humans and agents drive customer success together, increasing customer loyalty, with trust, where this partnership makes us human, achieve more, and enable more efficient organization, and this is possible today. And we've introduced Agentforce 3 system to support this journey to Agentforce Enterprise by adding agents to all our Salesforce applications, allowing us to connect customers, employees, operations, and agents in a single unified secure platform, which is easy to use, that provides observability, and orchestration and interoperability with external agents in a controlled fashion. This is what we deliver with Agentforce for communications. Now, moving into telecommunications, and what, which are the driving forces that we are seeing in the market and in our industry. There is a significant aim to grow by diversification, and this is enabled by 5G, the Telco to Telco journey, IoT, and convergent non-Telco products. It's also a moment of collaboration where Telcos are trying to diversify, trying to bring new products into their portfolio, and this would only be achieved by creating innovation, but also by establishing partnerships. Of course, there is pressure to reduce operational cost, and it's been for the last few years where growth is, is not, is not increasing, and therefore we need to still keep our margins. And here the rise of AI, and AI enabling automation, the co-investment in network infrastructure, is also a new trend, we're seeing how companies are reaching agreement to continue deploy and invest in network development, but at the same time we are seeing companies that are had decided to divest in the network, and it's focused more on the customer service, on how we are dealing with our customers, increasing our portfolio and reinventing themselves. Churn's still there, especially in saturated markets. Many, many countries have significant growth in mobile penetration, in fixed penetration, and we are getting to the point where this became a battle, who's getting the customer. So, how do we avoid this, enhancing the customer experience. This has to do with hyper-personalization, but also as Telcos and, as we were saying, since the beginning of the presentation, reinventing Telcos and moving into what we call the convergent household, which is basically going beyond the typical telecommunication service offering and also adding things like solar panels, insurance, banking services, etc, etc. And we need to do this in all channels, and AI will play a role in putting all these things together. Telcos are also facing and will continue to face regulation and compliance, either through network investment or through the entrance of competitors, not just our competitors, over the top competitors, and who knows what because, you know, everything is, is to be discovered in the next few years. We are a heavy regulated industry, and in many regions of the world, there's still a lot of data protection regulation, security regulation, and in the last few years, for the good of all, sustainability. As Telcos are moving into this technology evolution as they are trying to reinvent themselves into new market models, and facing competition, there's also a fight for talent and skill, that, you know, it's it's typical I said collaboration before, but at the same time we're going to try to attract new talent, new skills for the technology and for the new industries, and there is a level of speed and uncertainty that we'd not seen before. As I said before, the rise of AI is bringing lots of this, the technology, the regulation, the geopolitical environment as well, is creating some level of uncertainty and we need to navigate this risk, and this will encompass a lot of operational efforts and a lot of investment that are still to be seen. As Telcos, we are also going to be the enablers of the Agentic Enterprise and Agentic revolutions. I, you know, I I've recently read an article which basically was saying that only 3% of the bandwidth of the network bandwidth is utilized by machines today. In a matter of five years, this will completely change, and machines will be occupying that. That it will mean a lot of investment in network and a lot of investment in security and managing this interaction. So, what about an Agentic enterprise in telecommunications? What about if we have, if we would have an unconstrained workforce where our employees can serve, fulfill, and be more efficient in everything they do, and therefore increase the productivity and free up resources for things that matter most, for more meaningful tasks? What if we would have or we would be able to have unconstrained experiences where in every channel, in every place, it wouldn't matter how we are connecting with our customers in a hyper-personalized, natural language driven by agents and supporting our sales or service representatives. What about if we would have an unconstrained growth where we can sell more and more efficiently, and we can deploy new products and services faster? As I said before, this would allow Telcos to reinvent themselves and move into other adjacent industries. And many Telcos have started this journey already. They've they've experimented, in a small experimental phase with AI, in different parts of of the customer journey, different areas. In general what we are seeing is that it's it's easy to start, specifically with simple use cases, but as you're moving forward, it's becoming more complex, and it's been very, very difficult, leading to many, many of these AI transformation projects failing. In Salesforce, we've created our industry specific versions of Agentforce 360, Agentforce for Communications, and we're doing this by delivering specific industry data, metadata and semantic models that allow us to conten contextualize the way we're going to be working with AI, where agents will be able to auto-complete complex telecom workflows, not just answering the typical FAQ, but acting upon request, upon different actions and processes in the telecommunication customer journey, where it's grounded with trusted data and we're able to operate with external agents in a controlled fashion. This is what we deliver with Agentforce for Communications. Now, imagine in, in your customer journey, whether you're prospecting, you are selling, servicing, ordering, retention, that in every step of that journey, you are assisted by agents, whether they can be assisted, autonomous agents, helping you deliver a better customer experience. Where you can follow up on 100% of your leads through agents, where you can create a specific marketing campaigns, which are more targeted to the specific behaviors of your customers, where you can serve autonomously, where the customer is talking to an agent in a natural way. This is what we can achieve. This is what we have already built in Agentforce 360 for Communications.
[15:34]And of course, you can imagine lots of use cases. The, the main message here and you can see these in different places or different areas of the telecommunication journey, billing resolution, troubleshooting, quoting, cell support, customer experience, commerce, marketing, there are plenty of use cases. And Salesforce we are ready to do that. We've created our own specific industry agents, but we also enable our technology through different actions to be able for you to customize and create your own agents with clicks and no code. Of course, we're going to accelerate the journey by creating some standard tools, but we understand that every specific telecommunication provider will have his own operations and his own means of doing things that will require some degree of customization to your own specifics. The message is we are ready, we have those tools ready, and customers, telecommunication providers around the world have initiated this journey. And we've seen different use cases in different areas, and they are already achieving significant results. A few of them here. We had light agents in different telecommunications and media providers around the world, whether is to boost efficiency, to have a better quality in pipeline and pipeline execution, to grow revenue by being able to produce quotes faster, to boost efficiencies. Now, as I said before, many of them are starting with FAQ, they're starting simple. There is a reason for this, which is motivation and trust. To get the right motivations into organizations and being able to get the trust to continue in this journey. We have already achieved fantastic results out of this. We also have automated autonomous experiences in self-services or in field service operations where we are able to provide significant support to our customers without human intervention and with an amazing benefits being achieved. So, to to, wrap up my part of the presentation, the message is, uh, a Telcon of the future is an Agentic Telcom that is embracing AI in everything they do, to support humans, to elevate humans, and to become more efficient. Thank you very much. Thank you, Juanma, it's been very, very clear. Maybe I'm going to rub two or three more minutes for for you and and ask you some questions, you know? Because I think that that that the people that are looking at us now, they want to, want to know if these some of these cases and some of the cases you have been able to see are transforming these Telcos, um, into, uh these orchestrators of services. Because you and and me know that Telcos, one of the biggest problems that they have is that their legacy, their legacy systems and their processes are very difficult to change. So, can you just give us uh some opinion, not not uh about this change, leaving, leaving the the the legacy system, making the change in the Telco. What's your experience? So, I've been engaged, uh, I mean lately most of my engagement I've been with telecommunication provider customer strategy officer. They, they are trying to understand how this is going to evolve, they are trying to embrace the AI and trying to make their organizations work. One critical thing is AI in the current shape would be as good as your legacy is, right? What is the tools that you've implemented? How AI is going to be able to add upon your existing BSS OSS systems? Are your process simplified? Do you need to rebuild your processes with AI in mind and an AI mindset? And this is happening today. I remember me in a chat with one of these gentlemen and and I was questioning, but do you have the right BSS OSS? Do you have this all siloed? Have you identified and been able to unify your data and make that data actionable in the AI ledger? Have you got the tools to really create this efficiency? And and then they start thinking, they start thinking, well, maybe, maybe yes, maybe it has to go into a deeper transformation. Maybe I need to put the engine into the right place to make, to be able to have AI working and achieve the results you are describing. Yeah, that's right. And and uh, I think that if they're not thinking in this, or they haven't been thinking this, uh, it's going to be a problem. The other, the other question that I have that I've heard, I've heard this a lot in the last seminars that I've been or in the last meetings that I've been, is that uh, one of the things that we are all going to demand from AI is the trust that we have to have in an AI. Because uh, we we must trust, we have to have somebody help us, um, uh, with this layer trust. Is Salesforce prepared for that? Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned before, our Agentforce 360 is a unified platform with security. We provide all the security for you to be able to communicate with your specific LLMs or the LLM of your choice in a secure fashion, without information leakage. This is very important and, and this is mandatory in this AI world. Everything that relates to security, data protection to protect your specific enterprise business, this is extremely important, and Salesforce can provide that. Yeah, then once I was in TM Forum in Copenhagen and I I was hearing a person from uh, I think it was AT&T where he was saying, today with AI where you can duplicate the voice, you can even have the knowledge of the people of who's talking to who. We have to, we're working in to assure that when your mother is calling you, she is really your mother and it's not a somebody that's trying to uh find a way of of getting to you and and taking out some money or hacking into you. So, that layer of of uh, security and and trust and and truth, etc., can't be done with the old legacy systems. It has to have a new platform that helps you do that, and I think that Salesforce is way ahead of of other other competitors for the telecommunication industry, no? specifically in customer experience journeys, where we are number one, either in telecommunications or in other industries, this is not necessarily industry specific for telecommunications, it's any industry, and this is what we do in Salesforce. So, uh wrapping it up a little bit, uh why why Nespon? Let me talk a little bit about Nespon that I represent Nespon is that uh, one, we are, we commit to to to the project and we get very, very close to to our clients. We understand them. We we we really have been in their shoes and that helps, helps many of our our customers because we are very close to them, we are very, very flexible, um for for this to be just okay, our project and implementation or our support team that that only does that. Um, we're helping uh uh organizations accelerate their transformation, uh the digital transformation because we have been as I said before, we have been in their shoes and we know what you need to convince the people of your company to be able to work in a different way, to able to accept the new technology not as a threat, but as somebody that comes here to help them do their job much better, uh in a better way, in in earning a lot of time uh and making, helping them have decisions and taking decisions much more quicker. And also of course, uh delivering scalable solutions because as Juanma just said and I, I didn't hadn't thought about that directly, um, the the uh, artificial intelligence is going to consume the the resources very, very quickly, the resources of a network very, very quickly. So, network doesn't have to be uh the network itself. It has to be prepared to scale, it has to be prepared to go to another level and that's what we're we're doing. Um, so thank you so much for for being here, for listening to us.
[24:29]We don't like to do these webinars too long because we know that you all have your your time is is quite uh, uh, scarce or so we we want, you had a chat. I I forgot to tell you that you had a chat. All the questions and answers that you can deliver us, we're going to answer them and I hope you enjoyed this half an hour that we we were together and uh, okay, this is the end so thanks.
