June 09, 2026

Ep 142 - AT&T bets on the last mile (Shawn Hakl)

18 minutes

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.

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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

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By Danielle Rios, TelcoDR

4.8

2424 ratings