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Powering the AI Revolution: Zayo’s Bold Move to Lead the Future of Fiber and Digital Infrastructure

Carrie Charles
By Carrie Charles
Podcast

In this episode, Andrés Irlando, President and COO of Zayo Group, unpacks the transformative impact of Zayo’s acquisition of Crown Castle’s fiber assets and what it means for the future of digital infrastructure. From expanding Zayo’s metro reach and boosting AI corridor connectivity to bridging the digital divide and enabling edge computing, Andres outlines how this bold move positions Zayo at the forefront of the fiber revolution. He also shares insights on AI compute hubs, public-private partnerships, and the company’s entrepreneurial culture that continues to drive innovation at scale.

Zayo provides bandwidth to the world’s most impactful companies, fueling the innovations that are transforming society. With a network that stretches over 16.8 million fiber miles and spans an impressive 141,000 route miles, Zayo is not just in the business of connectivity – we’re in the business of limitless potential.

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irlando andres
Powering the AI Revolution: Zayo’s Bold Move to Lead the Future of Fiber and Digital Infrastructure 2

Andrés Irlando serves as President of Zayo Group, a $2B+ communications infrastructure company owned by private equity firms DigitalBridge and EQT with operations in North America and Europe. He is involved in all aspects of the business, including strategy, driving organic growth, rightsizing costs, and corporate development and integrations.

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Carrie Charles
Carrie Charleshttps://broadstaffglobal.com
Carrie Charles is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Broadstaff, the leader in specialized workforce solutions for telecommunications and technology. Carrie is a thought leader on workforce trends, women in tech and workplace diversity, and is the host of the Let's Get Digital podcast on RCR Wireless News for a global audience of 150K+. Carrie Charles currently serves as the Executive Director of Industry Relations of the WIA-affiliated Women’s Wireless Leadership Forum (WWLF), with 2023 marking her fifth year on the board. Carrie serves on the Board of Directors of CableRunner International and the NEDAS Technology Association, and as the mother of a childhood cancer survivor, Carrie has aligned her personal mission with her role on the Board of Directors of the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation. Carrie additionally serves on the board of the CEO Council of Tampa Bay as the 2023 - 2024 Programs Chair. Using her diverse background as a lifelong entrepreneur, Certified Financial Planner, Certified Master Life Coach and a US Marine Corps veteran, Carrie is passionate about creating a culture of wellness and excellence. For over 30 years, she has helped thousands grow personally and professionally, and has helped companies like General Dynamics, Hewlett Packard and Eli Lilly attract, engage and retain their employees. Carrie has been a featured expert on Axios, Entrepreneur, Inc., NBC, HSN, Clear Channel networks, Thrive Global and various tech publications. Under Carrie's leadership, Broadstaff's growth has received numerous accolades, including Inc. Magazine's Inc. 5000 (2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020), the Tampa Bay Fast 50 (2023, 2022, 2020 and 2019), SIA's List of Fastest-Growing US Staffing Firms (2023, 2022), WPO’s 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies (2023). In 2022, Broadstaff earned a spot on Inc. Magazine’s inaugural Power Partners list. Carrie is a member of EY’s Entrepreneurial Winning Women™ North America Class of 2022, and a finalist for EY's Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2022 Florida Award. In 2021, Carrie was chosen as Tampa Bay Business and Wealth Magazine's CEO of the Year, and in 2019 was an honoree of Tampa Bay Business Journal's Businesswoman of the Year.

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Google Cloud Next shows how network operators and vendors are using AI for telecom

We already know that businesses are pushing hard to figure out how artificial intelligence can benefit them. In telecom specifically, an Nvidia survey earlier this year found that 37% of respondents said their companies were investing in AI for telecom to improve network planning and operations, and 33% said that there had already been investments in AI for telecom field operations.

At this week’s Google Cloud Next event, some of Google Cloud’s specific work on advancing the use of AI for telecom is being highlighted, as well as AI for enterprises in other verticals. Here are three perspectives on how companies are leveraging Google Cloud AI for telecom.

–Verizon has integrated Google Cloud’s generative AI into customer operations, which the two companies said has led to “95% comprehensive answerability for customer inquiries” and “demonstrably more efficient and effective customer care interactions.” Verizon is making use of a Google Cloud conversational AI agent that leverages Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, Gemini models and Agent Assist Panel in order to give its customer service reps “real-time, context-aware, and personalized answers” to customer questions, as opposed to the reps having to do manual searches of knowledge bases.

Verizon has deployed this across 28,000 customer care reps and retail stores. Additional features like automated summaries of conversations, and automated follow-up action reminders, are also in the process of being rolled out. Those internal AI agents are in addition to several genAI tools that are directly customer-facing and use Google’s Gemini models for virtual assistants which use natural language.

Background image: Verizon

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud and the integration of Gemini into our customer care platforms mark a significant advancement in our commitment to providing exceptional customer experiences,” said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, CEO of Verizon Consumer. “The tangible results demonstrate the power of AI to enhance efficiency and empower our customer care teams.”

“The impact of Gemini on Verizon’s customer service operations is a testament to our deep partnership and Verizon’s commitment to continued innovation,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “These results demonstrate the potential of AI to not just improve operations, but to create more meaningful and helpful interactions for customers everywhere, ultimately driving significant value for businesses.”

-“We’re really trying hard to build an autonomous network which is going to be obviously driven by AI more and more over time,” said David Sauvageau, director of software development, data and AI for Bell Canada, in a briefing call prior to Google Cloud Next.

In general, he continued, the network operator see AI as a “fundamental building block for the future of telecom, for innovation, for customer operations and for network operations.”

He said in the short-term, Bell Canada is prioritizing AI applications for telecom which “really focus on optimizing our customer experience and network ops.” For the latter in particular, Sauvageau said, “Our goal is really to leverage all the data that we have available in AI in order to predict and prevent issues before they actually impact our customers. So, really moving from reactive to preventive customer experience.”

Additionally, Sauvageau said, that Bell Canada believes AI is crucial for managing the increased complexity of telecom networks. “We need to be much more efficient, [and have] have faster innovations in areas like edge computing, digital twin, 6G or any other future network technologies. And ultimately … our goal is to build and accelerate the development of our AI-powered autonomous networks.”

-Razvan Teslaru, VP and head of strategy and portfolio for cloud software and services at Ericsson, said that the use of AI for telecom encompasses both increased efficiency and increased monetization—the latter being magic words for the telecom industry right now.

Autonomy is both about enabling differentiated connectivity at scale, he said, and monetization of that differentiated connectivity. At this year’s Mobile World Congress Barcelona, one of the things Ericsson spotlights was how it integrates its service orchestration with Google Cloud and its Vertex AI, Teslaru noted.

It’s now possible, he said, for a user to express their intent in natural language: A request to configure a specific type of connectivity to, say, a hospital, over a dedicated slice. “You can have Gemini interpret that intent and break it into service orders. … Then AI agents can take over these service orders and take them into execution, and also observe the results, so we can take corrective action autonomously,” he said.

So ultimately, then, network autonomy is about delivering personalized (or differentiated) connectivity with efficiency, while also doing so at a scale that means more effective and large-scale monetization.

Google Cloud emphasizes AI agents for telecom

Erwan Menard, director (outbound) of product management for cloud AI at Google Cloud, said that “When we look ahead, we envision networks that can largely manage themselves through the use of intelligent software agents.” He continued: “Think of these agents as digital experts that can automatically handle tasks like network configuration, problem solving and resource allocation.This would free up telcos from any routine operational burden, allowing human experts to focus on innovation and new services, ultimately leading to greater efficiency and productivity in network operations.”

In particular, he emphasized, telecoms face the unique challenge of having a “mission-critical duty to maintain knowledge over technologies which could be in service for decades. So the notion of being able to tap accurately through the knowledge of the company to help onboard a new resource or to assist somebody who has a decision to make—technical or business—is quite an important challenge in the telecom industry.” Google Cloud’s Google Agentspace was designed for such knowledge-heavy industries, Menard continued, to retrieve information across multiple systems with the idea of using “agentic workflows to be able to invest a new way of work.”

This week, the company is spotlighting its a new Agent Gallery, so that employees across the telecom organization can get personalized suggestions on which AI agents would be useful to them—either out-of-the-box from Google Cloud, agents built by the company or third-party AI agents. Google Cloud is also offering the ability to design and build agents with a no-code interface, in which people can essentially walk through a series of steps and “convert that sequence into an agent that then becomes your personalized assistant,” Menard explained.

 

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