Ep 147 - ANTA: TelecomTV’s AI-Native Telco Accelerator (Guy Daniels)

Everyone has an opinion about how telcos are doing with AI. Almost nobody has evidence—until now. Guy Daniels, chief strategy officer and content director at TelecomTV, spent the year compiling the AI-Native Telco Index—the first 100% evidence-based report on telco AI adoption*.* It’s one piece of TelecomTV’s new AI-Native Telco Accelerator (ANTA), a community built to bring operators, vendors, and standards bodies together to share what’s actually working in our industry.  I sat down with Guy to talk about what his research reveals, how ANTA works, and what’s coming at the AI-Native Telco Forum in Düsseldorf this September. Listen now to hear: - What ANTA is, and the three pieces that make it run \[04:21]; - Which operators are doing impressive AI work \[08:01]; - Why so many telcos keep their best AI work hidden \[09:08]; and - The “AI in telco” myth that Guy’s research debunks \[13:44]. **Links and Resources:**  - Read TelecomTV’s AI-Native Telco Accelerator (ANTA) announcement, the community launched to help operators move from AI pilots to deployments that actually scale. - Learn more about ANTA and the AI-Native Telco Index—the first evidence-based read on how 56 operators are scaling AI. The members-only report drops this September at the Forum in Düsseldorf. - Join the conversation! Book your spot at the AI-Native Telco Forum, September 8 and 9 in Düsseldorf. - Learn how the Totogi Ontology keeps every AI decision in one governed model, so you can show which rule fired and why. It’s exactly the kind of real-world deployment ANTA is tracking. Watch it run at our demo pod in Düsseldorf or set up a meeting with Team Totogi. - Catch up on the AI breakthroughs I rattle off at the top of the show: - Anthropic’s “When AI builds itself” report lays out how AI now writes most of its own code and runs unsupervised for hours, even days. - Fortune’s write-up covers how Claude Fable 5 helped disprove the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture. - Explore the two operators that Guy singles out as pace-setters: - Read about Deutsche Telekom’s march toward AI-native and the customer-facing bot that’s posting published results. - Check out Orange, which is putting AI at the center of its strategy and briefing investors on it, something almost no other telco does. - Watch my keynote and panel from last year’s AI-Native Telco Forum, where a room of operators told me you can’t vibe code a carrier-grade BSS—so we built one live that day. - See what Totogi shipped in Düsseldorf last year: 617,000 lines of production code, generated live, all captured in this LinkedIn recap. - Go deeper in my blog, “Düsseldorf changed everything for BSS,” on why the use case is never the moat. - Want an invite to the Totogi party while you’re at the AI-Native Telco Forum? Stop by our demo pod, or DM me on LinkedIn or X at @TelcoDR for more information. - Speaking of parties, cue up some of the greatest ever put on film to help you prepare for a good time: the house party in Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places, the night that spirals in Bachelor Party, the rager that leaves the house a mess in Sixteen Candles, and the granddaddy party movie of them all, The Hangover. (Warning: explicit scenes, but they’re epic so I’m putting them in the show notes anyway!) - 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:** Guy Daniels is chief strategy officer and content director at TelecomTV, where he leads editorial strategy across the company’s events, including the DSP Leaders World Forum, the Great Telco Debate, and the AI-Native Telco Forum. He recently launched ANTA, the AI-Native Telco Accelerator—TelecomTV’s industry-backed initiative uniting operators, vendors, and industry bodies to help telcos move from AI experimentation to real-world deployment. A pioneer of online video in telecoms, Guy co-founded Decisive Media and TelecomTV in 2001 after a decade in telecoms publishing. **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