Inside Out: A TM Forum podcast

Affordable mobile telephony has helped people across Africa to bridge the digital divide. But are we on the cusp of creating a new divide - the AI divide? In this podcast Khaoula Elagouni, head of AI for African languages at Orange, talks about the initiatives that the operator is undertaking to ensure that people across Africa can get access to AI services.

Charles Molapisi, MTN's Group Executive for Technology and Information, discusses with TM Forum's Willie Stegmann the importance for technology leaders to focus on business outcomes. He outlines how MTN Group is using AI to reduce costs, improve customer experience and simplify operations, and notably in the mature, low-margin market of South Africa.

In addition, he explains why MTN is the investing in software engineering hubs across Africa to develop local digital and AI skills and reduce reliance on external vendors.

In this episode of Inside Out, Mark Newman and Willie Stegmann speak with Vodafone Group CIO Ahmed El-Sayed about the transformation of the technology function in the AI era. Topics covered include how to bring AI across the entire software development lifecycle, people transformation and the changing roles of software engineers and architects, and building AI into customer journeys.

TM Forum members at this year's DTW Ignite 2026 demonstrated many examples of how AI adoption and autonomy have entered a new phase of adoption. They also debated how to address the challenges of effecting organizational change and implementing trustworthy AI at scale, as you will hear in this summary. In keeping with the theme of AI deployment, TM Forum's AI agent, AIVA, drew on dozens of presentations and debates from the event to produce the summary. Meanwhile, Aaron Boasman-Patel, Vice President Innovation, TM Forum is the 'human in the loop' providing the curation and narration.

TM Forum members at this year's DTW Ignite 2026 demonstrated many examples of how AI adoption and autonomy have entered a new phase of adoption. They also debated how to address the challenges of effecting organizational change and implementing trustworthy AI at scale, as you will hear in this summary. In keeping with the theme of AI deployment, TM Forum's AI agent, AIVA, drew on dozens of presentations and debates from the event to produce the summary. Meanwhile, Aaron Boasman-Patel, Vice President Innovation, TM Forum is the 'human in the loop' providing the curation and narration.

Peter Leukert, Chief Digital Officer at BT, discusses with TM Forum how an AI-native future depends of nurturing future skills and building strong foundations in data management, cybersecurity, testing and software engineering

Mark Sanders, Chief Architect, Tesltra, discusses with Guy Lupo, Executive Vice President, AI & Data Innovation, TM Forum, how the operator is addressing security, governance and trust as it builds the next phase of network autonomy on a foundation of a composable architecture

Sanders and Lupo explore Telstra's vision of a knowledge plane, which transforms data into structured, machine-readable intelligence that enables autonomous network systems to make trusted decisions.

Alongside this, they address the concept of model-as-a-service and why it is emerging as a critical capability, helping telcos harness rapidly evolving AI models without being overwhelmed by complexity, cost or risk.

The also focus on the importance of trust as telcos evolve their architectures, operations and use of AI to create autonomus operations that deliver new customer experiences.

Telefónica has set ambitious goals for network autonomy in Spain, Brazil and Germany, as the group's Global Chief Technology and Information Officer, Andrea Folgueiras, discusses with George Glass, TM Forum's CTO.

Folgueiras explores how and why the company is taking a holistic approach to delivering autonomous networks, from redesigning processes end-to-end, through to rethinking organizational structures, addressing governance and reskilling people.

In early 2026 Swisscom started a multi-year effort to modernize the digital software core that powers its B2C and B2B businesses. In this webinar we talk to CTIO MarkDusener about the role of AI in the transformation and how it offers CSPs the possibility of transitioning to an open, composable architecture even across those applications, which until now have remained dependent on legacy systems.