T-Mobile’s Ecosystem Strategy for the Enterprise AI Era

John Siefert (0:08)

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another Cloud Wars podcast. This one, a special report around the AI category, as many of us have been diving headfirst into this category over the last couple of years.

This podcast, again, as I mentioned, a little bit of a special report. I am joined by Chris Jones of T-Mobile. Chris leads Ecosystems and Partnership Alliances over at T-Mobile. Hey, Chris.

Chris Jones (0:35)

How are you doing, John? It's good to be here.

John Siefert (0:37)

Great to be here with you, my friend and gang. Everybody knows Chris and the team over at T-Mobile, doing some really interesting things here around this AI revolution that we're all living through. I'm going to have Chris give us a skinny on a little bit of the stuff that T-Mobile is focused on.

Also, just to let everybody know, Chris and the T-Mobile team are going to be over at Community Summit North America with us, the largest independent innovation, education, and training event in the Microsoft ecosystem. Chris and the team are going to be underwriting the agent and co-pilot general session as well as a very cool pickleball court on the Summit North America show floor. We're going to be having some fun tournaments and stuff.

Chris, I'm going to take a step back and up real quick, because I think all of us are very familiar with the brand of T-Mobile. We see the commercials on TV and on the Internet and all those sorts of things. We all know T-Mobile as a leading telecommunications organization, a provider in the category. But one of the things that you've been really focused on is this premise of enterprise connectivity and the role that T-Mobile plays in this part of the business, especially with the T-Mobile for Business division of the organization. Fill us in a little bit.

Chris Jones (2:02)

Thanks, John. To your point, I think most people when they think of T-Mobile, they're thinking of us as a cell phone company. They know us for what do they do on a daily basis, is they're making phone calls, is they're connecting with others that they know. But they're forgetting about the fact that we have an entire enterprise division that we, as you've mentioned, we call it T-Mobile for Business, and we're providing enterprise customers, all segments, all verticals, more than just cell phones. We're providing advanced connectivity solutions that are really designed for the distributed and mobile workforce.

So, the way I like to think about it is, think of us like electricity, right? You don't often think about electricity until it doesn't work, right? So, think about what we offer as sometimes you don't think about it until it doesn't work. And that goes for both your voice connectivity, but specifically really with the wireless connectivity, right? We're a little bit like the power grid. If you don't have it, you're very frustrated. When you do have it, you're sort of not thinking about it. But as we think about this category, we're trying not to be a telco. We're trying to really be the infrastructure layer that everything works on top of. Along those lines, we've got things like 5G Advanced Network Solutions, we've got fixed wireless, we've got SuperBroadband, which is where we pair our 5G network with Starlink into a fully managed connectivity solution where you've got two independent paths instead of just having everything connected to one path.

It's really an uptime, a security, a reach. Sometimes a lot of people, you look at that, it's not exciting, but it is exciting when you don't have it. I think what's important is to remember what we're building is we're building this infrastructure so that whatever you're doing, whether it's AI, whether it's your company's data, whatever you're doing, if it doesn't work, you have a problem and we're going to be that underlayer to keep everything that you're a partner and their customers, what are they doing? It doesn't work without what we're doing.

John Siefert (4:21)

What's so interesting about that to me, Chris, is somebody who's been in the IT telecommunications applications, now AI world for as long as I have. The funny thing is you can have the coolest applications, the coolest AI tools that you're working, all those things without connectivity, they sure ain't worth very much.

That's something I think that everybody's starting to realize here in this AI era as they adapt to it and all that sort of thing. Contextualize it a little bit for me because now we're in this world where the data needs to be governed as the agents are actually accessing this information and then feeding oftentimes even with humans out of the loop, in some cases with some of the agentic architectures and stuff that are in place. With all those things are going on, what's truly making T-Mobile unique in being able to bring this to life as you put it in this underlying layer?