Telco in 20

Telcos love mergers. In 2025 alone, the industry spent nearly $70 billion on M&A, and every single deal brought its own baggage. New systems, new cultures, new tech debt—all bolted onto everything that came before. Everyone celebrates the deal. No one celebrates the hard work of bringing two organizations together.

For this episode, I sit down with Daniel Askeroth, senior vice president of telco at Norlys, the Danish energy and broadband co-op that acquired Telia Denmark in 2024. Daniel spent 17 years at Telia Denmark. Now, he's the one tasked with stitching his old company into Norlys, which is itself the product of 40+ prior mergers. We dig into how he runs the integration without breaking the customer experience, how to unite workforces without losing the people you need most, and what Daniel would do differently if he had to do it all over again.

Listen now to hear:

Why the people side of mergers takes longer than anyone expects [03:20];

How Norlys keeps integration invisible to customers [05:08];

How AI is changing the way Daniel’s teams build [06:48]; and

What Daniel learned from temporarily stepping into an HR role [11:58].

Links and Resources:

Read Bain's Telecom M&A: Here Are the Latest Deal Trends Worldwide for the latest on where the industry is placing its bets.

Learn more about Norlys's $926M acquisition of Telia Denmark and why adding mobile was the missing piece in its full-service play for Danish consumers.

Check out Daniel’s LinkedIn post about the Norlys leadership role-swap. He traded his telco seat for one in People & Culture for a few days and came back with a different perspective on the business.

Every merger means bringing together new billing stacks, CRMs, and decades of past decisions. Learn how the Totogi Ontology sits over all those acquired systems so they speak the same language.

Want to see the Totogi Ontology in action? Catch Team Totogi at DTW Ignite, running June 23-25 in Copenhagen.

Daniel's kids discovered historical architecture through Pokémon GO, a location-based mobile game that uses your phone's GPS and camera to catch virtual Pokémon at real-world landmarks. Launched in 2016, it peaked at 232 million players and still draws 55 million monthly players and $545M in annual revenue—accidentally tricking a generation into exploring historic landmarks. Who knew Pokémon GO was still going so strong?

Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.

You can find the episode transcript here.

Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value they can bring. 

Follow DR:

Have an idea for a Telco in 20 podcast guest or topic? Send it in!

Want to sponsor a podcast? Let us know.

Follow DR on X @TelcoDR

The Telco in 20 podcast is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts globally by Listen Notes! 🎉 We’ve won 2026, 2025, and 2024 Hermes Creative Awards, and 2025 and 2024 MarCom Awards. We are also recognized as a TeckNexus Top 12 Telco and Tech Podcast, Forrester Top 100 Channel Podcast and Feedspot Top 10 Telecom Podcast.

If you enjoy the podcast, would you leave us a review? It takes seconds to do in your app and really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. And I love reading your feedback and reviews!

This week’s guest:

Daniel Askeroth is senior vice president of telco at Norlys, a Danish energy and telecoms cooperative. He leads Norlys’ telecom business following the acquisition of Telia Denmark, including the integration and transformation focusing on simplifying systems, aligning cultures, and driving large-scale technology and organizational change.

With over 17 years of experience at Telia Denmark prior to joining Norlys, Daniel brings deep expertise in telecom operations, transformation, and leadership. He is passionate about building strong teams and delivering customer-focused, future-ready connectivity solutions.

Podcast Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR

Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media

Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing

Audio Editor: Andrew Condell

Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery

Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio

Music: Dyami Wilson

Every major telco is racing to claim a piece of the AI infrastructure stack. Operators like Telefónica, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, SoftBank, and TELUS are betting on sovereign clouds, AI factories, and GPU-as-a-service to deliver local data, national compute, and a seat at the AI table. 

Then there's AT&T. In March, it announced AWS Interconnect - last mile: fiber and fixed wireless plugged directly into AWS and engineered for AI workloads. AT&T’s view is that enterprises using AI don't just need more compute—they need flatter networks and faster connections. So it’s betting on the layer it owns outright—the last mile.

In this episode, I'm joined by Shawn Hakl, SVP of product at AT&T Business. We dig into why the operator is partnering with hyperscalers instead of competing with them, the use case where AT&T deployed AI at the edge to cut latency from 110ms to 40ms, and what an "agent-consumable" network actually looks like.

Listen now to hear:

Why AT&T sees hyperscalers as partners, not rivals [05:18];

What it takes to put AI into production at telco scale—and lessons learned from AT&T's internal deployment [07:14];

The edge AI deployment that cut latency from 110ms to 40ms for a live customer [08:45]; and

What it really means to make a network "agent-consumable" [10:55].

Links and Resources:

Read the AT&T and AWS announcement on AWS Interconnect - last mile, which brings AT&T's fiber and fixed wireless connectivity directly into AWS environments.

Learn more about AT&T's edge AI collaboration with Cisco and NVIDIA, which pushes real-time AI inference directly to the network edge.

AT&T doesn't just sell AI solutions; it runs on them. Learn how Ask AT&T has evolved into a full agentic platform, with more than 100,000 users consuming 27 billion tokens a day and teams building custom AI agents with a drag-and-drop tool.

Want to scale AI agents without the semantic chaos? Learn how the Totogi Ontology gives AI the business context it needs to discover, act, and execute—so agents stop flying blind.

Shawn was on the Canadian national luge team, which means he knows a thing or two about commitment once you're flying down the track. Elana Meyers Taylor knows that feeling too! At age 41, in her 5th Olympic appearance, she finally won the Olympic gold medal in women's monobob at Milano Cortina. So, Shawn might be right—stick to the plan!

Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.

You can find the episode transcript here.

Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value they can bring. 

Follow DR:

Have an idea for a Telco in 20 podcast guest or topic? Send it in!

Want to sponsor a podcast? Let us know.

Follow DR on X @TelcoDR

The Telco in 20 podcast is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts globally by Listen Notes! 🎉 We’ve won 2026, 2025, and 2024 Hermes Creative Awards, and 2025 and 2024 MarCom Awards. We are also recognized as a TeckNexus Top 12 Telco and Tech Podcast, Forrester Top 100 Channel Podcast and Feedspot Top 10 Telecom Podcast.

If you enjoy the podcast, would you leave us a review? It takes seconds to do in your app and really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. And I love reading your feedback and reviews!

This week’s guest:

As the senior vice president of product at AT&T Business, Shawn Hakl is responsible for the portfolio servicing enterprise, public sector, partner, and small business segments, which generates over $30 billion in annual revenue. A seasoned leader in cloud, AI, and communications, Shawn’s unique knowledge of software, security, and infrastructure is helping enterprises, government, and small businesses harness the power of technology to successfully execute on their digital transformation. In his current role, Shawn is responsible for wireline, 5G/wireless, voice/UC, security/SASE, data center, AIOps, and Network-as-a-Service product lines.

Podcast Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR

Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media

Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing

Audio Editor: Andrew Condell

Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery

Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio

Music: Dyami Wilson

Every operator made the same bet—go digital, close stores, turn over distribution to the resellers. Somewhere along the way, they gave away the customer relationship. In the first half of 2025, data usage grew in 92% of markets while ARPU grew in only 50%. Operators are delivering more yet earning less. 

Tele2 is fighting back. It’s opening physical stores while everyone else is closing them, consolidating six IT stacks down to two, and using AI to rebuild subscriber relationships at scale. For this episode, I talk with Ove Wik, EVP and CTIO at Tele2, about what it takes to reclaim customer relationships, why most BSS transformations never get finished, and what real change actually takes.

Listen now to hear:

The question that got Tele2 from six IT stacks to two [03:58];

The 80/20 trade-off most operators refuse to make [05:45];

Why Tele2 is opening physical stores while most operators are closing them [09:41]; and

What real BSS transformation actually requires [12:13].

Links and Resources:

Check out Tele2's latest annual report. CEO Jean-Marc Harion declares that the company is going "back to the future."

Learn more about Tele2 and Telenor's Net4Mobility joint venture, which just hit 99.9% 5G population coverage in Sweden.

Since we recorded this episode, Tele2 has named a new CEO. Nicholas Högberg will take over for Jean-Marc Harion as president and CEO on July 1, 2026.

Are you planning a transformation and don’t know what trade offs to make? Use the Totogi Ontology. It maps your business processes and customer interactions so you can see exactly what matters and make trade-offs with confidence.

Tele2 is using AI and hyperpersonalization to rebuild subscriber relationships. Watch my MWC23 talk, SUPERCHARGE your MVNO with personalization to see how operators of any size can use subscriber data to deliver tailored, individual offers that grow ARPU and stop churn—exactly the kind of direct customer engagement Tele2 is now chasing.

Ove renovates homes in his spare time and knows how to finish projects. If only all telco transformations made it over the finish line! This clip from the movie The Money Pit shows how quickly things can go wrong.

Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.

You can find the episode transcript here.

Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value they can bring. 

Follow DR:

Have an idea for a Telco in 20 podcast guest or topic? Send it in!

Want to sponsor a podcast? Let us know

Follow DR on X @TelcoDR

The Telco in 20 podcast is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts globally by Listen Notes! 🎉 We’ve also won 2026, 2025, and 2024 Hermes Creative Awards, and 2025 and 2024 MarCom Awards. We are also recognized as a TeckNexus Top 12 Telco and Tech Podcast, Forrester Top 100 Channel Podcast and Feedspot Top 10 Telecom Podcast.

If you enjoy the podcast, would you leave us a review? It takes seconds to do in your app and really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. And I love reading your feedback and reviews!

This week’s guest:

Ove is CTIO at Tele2. He has spent his entire life in telecom operators, starting in Sweden at a time when one incumbent provided fixed telephony. He has navigated more than 40 years of telco evolution that has included intense competition, extensive product portfolios, and international operations.

With a background in engineering, Ove has worked in technology, product management, sales, operations, and strategy. Some of his international assignments have included COO at Yoigo Spain, Head of Transformation at Salt Switzerland, and Head of Digital Enablement at Veon Group. For more than 25 years, he has worked to drive change through a combination of technology, organization, and culture.

Podcast Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR

Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media

Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing

Audio Editor: Andrew Condell

Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery

Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio

Music: Dyami Wilson

Anthropic's latest model, Mythos, recently scored 94% on a benchmark for solving real software engineering problems—up from single digits just two and a half years ago. It also found a 27-year-old security flaw in OpenBSD that decades of human testing missed. AI's capabilities are exploding, and many operators are struggling to keep up.

For this episode, I'm talking with Roy Chua, founder and principal of AvidThink, an independent analyst firm that advises everyone from Silicon Valley startups to the world's largest telcos. We dive into the growing gap between how startups and telcos are adopting AI, what happens to the $50 billion professional services industry when AI can write telco software, and why agents need an ontology layer to actually deliver.

Listen now to hear:

How AI is collapsing the timeline on software engineering [02:21];

What telcos can learn from the evolution of Silicon Valley’s hiring practices [05:49];

The bombshell headed for the GSI revenue model [08:14]; and

What AI agents need to work in a live telco environment [11:15].

Links and Resources:

Learn more about Roy Chua and AvidThink, the independent analyst firm advising Silicon Valley startups and the world's largest telcos on technology strategy.

Learn about the Totogi Ontology and how it gives AI agents the business context they need to act on live telco systems, the missing layer Roy describes as essential for agents to work in production.

Read about Anthropic's Mythos model and the SWE-verified benchmark, the new standard for measuring AI coding capability.

Check out Project Glasswing, Anthropic's initiative to find security vulnerabilities across global software infrastructure using AI.

Look at Nifty IT’s stock performance, the market signal Roy points to when explaining why the GSI revenue model is under pressure even as earnings stay strong.

Check out Gauntlet AI, the intensive agentic AI training program for engineers who want to stand out in today’s market.

Read Stanford Digital Economy Lab's findings on software engineering employment, which shows jobs for 22- to 25-year-olds are down 20%. But there’s good news too—Austen Allred, Gauntlet AI’s founder, says hiring partners are actively seeking junior engineers who know AI, with starting salaries of $200K! The jobs are there, but you gotta learn AI.

Roy uses the term "Move 37" (made famous by the legendary 2016 AlphaGo–Lee Sedol Go match) to talk about an unexpected play nobody sees coming in telco. Allbirds pivoting to AI data centers is a favorite real-world example. We didn't see that coming!

Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.

You can find the episode transcript here.

Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value they can bring. 

Follow DR:

Have an idea for a Telco in 20 podcast guest or topic? Send it in!

Want to sponsor a podcast? Let us know

Follow DR on X @TelcoDR

The Telco in 20 podcast is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts globally by Listen Notes! 🎉 We’ve also won 2026, 2025, and 2024 Hermes Creative Awards, 2025 and 2024 MarCom Awards, and are recognized as a TeckNexus Top 12 Telco and Tech Podcast, Forrester Top 100 Channel Podcast and Feedspot Top 10 Telecom Podcast.

If you enjoy the podcast, would you leave us a review? It takes you seconds to do in your app and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. And I love reading your feedback and reviews!

This week’s guest:

Roy Chua, an entrepreneurial executive with 20+ years of IT experience, is the founder of AvidThink, an independent analyst firm covering infrastructure technologies at both carriers and enterprises. AvidThink's clients include Fortune 500 technology firms, early-stage startups, and upstart unicorns. Roy has been quoted by, and featured in, major publications including the Wall Street Journal, FierceTelecom/Wireless, The New Stack and Light Reading. He is a graduate of MIT Sloan (MBA) and UC Berkeley (BS, MS EECS).

Podcast Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR

Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media

Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing

Audio Editor: Andrew Condell

Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery

Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio

Music: Dyami Wilson

AI is reshaping telco. At NVIDIA’s GTC conference, AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast, and Spectrum announced they’re building AI grids, turning millions of existing cell sites and central offices into distributed AI compute infrastructure. NVIDIA's survey of 1,000 telco professionals found more than 90% reporting that AI is already delivering cost savings or revenue growth, with the biggest ROI coming from agentic AI for autonomous networks.

For this episode, I’m joined by Kanika Atri, Senior Director of Telecoms at NVIDIA. We dig into where real AI ROI lives in telco, why the network may be the world’s most underutilized compute asset, and the big unanswered question: who’s going to build the software that makes all of this work?

Listen now to hear:

How NVIDIA’s survey reveals where AI is already paying off [03:06];

Why telcos’ existing infrastructure could become the backbone of distributed AI [05:06];

The critical software gap nobody in the industry owns [11:19]; and

Why countries are turning to operators, not hyperscalers, to build their national AI [12:27].

Links and Resources:

Read NVIDIA’s State of AI in Telecommunications report, a survey of 1,000+ telecom professionals that covers where AI is delivering value, what’s driving investment, and how operators are planning for distributed AI computing and 6G.

Check out these blogs by Kanika Atri:

NVIDIA, Telecom Leaders Build AI Grids to Optimize Inference on Distributed Networks

Telcos Across Five Continents Are Building NVIDIA-Powered Sovereign AI Infrastructure



Read more about SoftBank’s AI-RAN breakthrough in Japan and Indosat’s full sovereign AI stack in Indonesia, including locally developed LLMs and 20+ AI applications.

NVIDIA made a $1 billion equity investment in Nokia to build CUDA-accelerated 5G software that runs on any platform. Watch NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Nokia CEO Justin Hotard explain the partnership in this interview.

Learn more about the Totogi Ontology and how it’s helping Tier-1 operators turn AI into actual profit.

Read the Appledore Research report on Totogi, Telecom-specific Ontology, the key to AI-native telco. It explains why context, not data, is the foundation AI agents need to work at scale (paywalled).

Kanika climbed cell towers early in her career. Maybe her amygdala doesn’t fire like most people’s—just like legendary free-solo climber Alex Honnold’s brain scans show little fear response to heights. He’s famous for scaling Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope (documented in the Oscar-winning film Free Solo), and most recently the 101-story Taipei 101 in Taiwan. Watch the news coverage here.

Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.

You can find the episode transcript here.

Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value they can bring. 

Follow DR:

Have an idea for a Telco in 20 podcast guest or topic? Send it in!

Want to sponsor a podcast? Let us know

Follow DR on X @TelcoDR

The Telco in 20 podcast is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts globally by Listen Notes! 🎉 We’ve also won 2024 and 2025 MarCom Awards, 2024 and 2025 Hermes Creative Awards, and are recognized as a TeckNexus Top 12 Telco and Tech Podcast, Forrester Top 100 Channel Podcast and Feedspot Top 10 Telecom Podcast.

If you enjoy the podcast, would you leave us a review? It takes you seconds to do in your app and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. And I love reading your feedback and reviews!

This week’s guest:

Kanika Atri is senior director of telecom products and marketing at NVIDIA, driving AI adoption across the telecom ecosystem. She works closely with hundreds of customers, developers, and partners to embed AI into networks, operations, and services—accelerating the shift to AI‑native wireless networks, autonomous agentic-AI-powered operations, sovereign AI factories, and 6G‑ready infrastructure. Through these engagements, she shapes product roadmaps, go‑to‑market strategies, and commercial partnerships that translate advanced AI capabilities into measurable business impact for the telecom industry. 

Podcast Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR

Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media

Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing

Audio Editor: Andrew Condell

Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery

Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio

Music: Dyami Wilson