- Hi Mo, thank you so much for joining us here today.
- It's great to be here with you, Naomi. And as you know, we're in the middle of our c-band auction. It's a quiet period and that's one of the things I'm not gonna be able to comment on today.
- OK, that makes sense. And where are you right now actually?
- I'm actually in Dallas, Texas, and it is quite cold here.
- Oh, did you guys got some snow and everything?
- We did. It was the first snow of the season yesterday. You can imagine every child in Dallas was elated.
- Amazing, incredible. Well, I want to talk a bit about 5G, of course, you being with AT&T. 5G is a platform technology, as we all know, and it will drive a broad array of innovations. I mean, imagine from smart cities to digital health, to AR, VR, XR and like more and more immersive content as we go along. What innovations have you most excited?
- Well, you know, I'd start by saying that while I love the new speed capabilities that 5G is bringing, it's really the ability to drive massive connectivity at incredibly low latency that's bringing to life amazing new innovations. And, you know, I know you know this, Naomi, and gamers broadly have known this forever, and soon I think it's something that everyone's going to know. But being able to create technologies that can harness latency that's as fast as the speed of thought is truly gonna usher in this next wave of technology innovation that'll define the decade that's ahead of us. You know, I'd focus on two things for you that really excite me. The first one is untethered VR and AR that isn't reliant on expensive PCs, right? But is using 5G to access nearby cloud instances AKA edge compute, and you know, this is a technology that's gonna revolutionize gaming, training, it's gonna introduce new working models, as well as improve customer experiences of business locations. Imagine walking into, you know, any major favorite stores of yours and have your glasses light up to show you the path to whatever product it is that you're looking for, right? It's pretty cool stuff. The second thing that I touch on is improved health. In the age of COVID, I'm really excited about how 5G is going to broadly enable better outcomes across all aspects of health care, right? Whether it's hospital systems and connected ambulances that now can push and pass data at scale to the hospital before the patient even goes in to improve patient care, to connected medicine cabinets that only open when it's the authorized user walking up to them, to even things like telehealth and remote patient monitoring that allow for, you know, aging individuals to have a better quality of life.
- Yeah.
- While getting better personalized care while being at home. Really cool innovations.
- Yeah, I mean the list goes on I can imagine too beyond that. 5G of course is going to help. We all, we always say it's going to help power the future. And of course our need for 5G access You know, that's all the more apparent now you know, as working and learning and meeting remotely. Everything is remote, Everything relies so heavily on technology like 5G. So what trends are you seeing now that consumers are spending more time at home doing?
- Well, you know, as we look at 2021 I think the theme is really going to continue to be hybrid work, right? Which is the mix of remote and virtual work from home, coupled with our frontline workers who actually have to go out and see other people every day as part of their job. You know, think retail, first responders, people who work in manufacturing, et cetera, and for remote work, I think we're going to continue to see the shift to enterprise-grade experiences inside the home. Broadly you know, I call this the blur of the enterprise and consumer divide and I'll give you three quick examples. You know, the first one is if I'm not working at home, say I'm a call center rep. I need to make sure that I can seamlessly authenticate and be secure and access my information, secure sensitive personal customer info. Cybersecurity is going to be critical inside the house. The second trend is really around multi-gig speeds over fiber. This has been pretty common for the last several years for businesses and, you know, I would expect that we're going to start seeing these capabilities in the home pretty soon. The third one is SD-WAN, right? Which is just a fancy name for a technology that's used to allow businesses to prioritize specific application traffic. And I think we're gonna see this inside of consumer homes. So as an example, you know, we're talking together on a video conference, I want to make sure that my business video conference experience is prioritized over someone else who may be gaming or streaming audio or video, what have you, right?
- Right. And then shifting out of the home and thinking about, you know, our employees on the frontline who still having the report into a physical location. It's really about accelerating adoption of these advanced technologies 5G, edge compute, IoT, to enable safer and better workplaces, whether it's, you know an office, smart factories, hospitals, retail stores. And you know, a great, simple example of this that's real today is IoT-enabled cameras. You know what some people call computer vision, that can help with things like managing social distancing, queuing, even thermal imaging, so that people can lean in and let someone know they've got an elevated temperature even when they may not know so themselves, it's pretty incredible.
- Wow, yeah, that is incredible. And you mentioned, of course that you know everything about the pandemic right now has just sped up technology and innovation and, you know, in countless sectors not just what we're talking about here today. So over the last 12 months, we've seen these huge advances obviously it's pushed it forward in a way that we've never seen before. Has our need for greater connectivity accelerated innovation, you think, and what does that look like in your mind?
- Yeah, for sure. I mean, COVID-19 has absolutely reinforced how critical connectivity is, you know, to almost every single aspect of our society. I frankly can't even imagine having had to quarantine and social distance without the technology that we've had available to us. Can you imagine if this was 10 years ago?
- Yeah, I can't, can't imagine it.
- Exactly, right?
- It would have been very lonely.
- Yes, quite right. You know, I think the catchphrase for this last year that really resonated with me is connectivity and this technology has allowed us to be isolated but not necessarily alone, right?
- Yeah.
- We've still been able to connect, work, friends, games, social media, video conferencing. It's been incredible.
- Yeah.
- And...
- Yeah, go ahead.
- You know, going back to your question, right? If I think about some of the most interesting innovations from the last year, I'll give you four quick examples. You know, the first one which was incredible is 5G holographic interview that happened as part of the NBA playoffs, right? Making sure people could appropriately social distance but essentially sit right next to one other. It's amazing, holographic communication is here, it's needed in the age of COVID. It's going to be needed thereafter, and I think we should all expect to see this expanded in 2021 and beyond.
- Oh yeah.
- The second example is smart AR glasses, right? So if you think about industries like retail and manufacturing, they've still had a fair degree of turnover, right? And so they needed to go out and hire new people and train them and bring them up to speed. And AR glasses with built-in see-what-I-see capabilities, allow trainers to train literally hundreds of people at the same time in a way that has frankly never been imagined before. And this technology, it's going to revolutionize training across almost every industry. We talk about retail manufacturing but also military, first responders, surgery, it's incredibly interesting technology.
- Yeah.
- The third one is magic mirrors in retail.
- OK.
- You know, so this is something that obviously existed before COVID, but we've seen COVID accelerate it. And essentially, if you haven't heard of magic mirrors imagine really large televisions, right? With 4K cameras built in that you stand in front of and they act like a mirror. You can now stand in front of them. You can virtually try on clothes. You can imagine in COVID people are asking themselves do I wanna go try on something that may have been tried on before? You can buy those clothes with a touchless checkout and then they're shipped directly to your home. And then the last example I give you, Naomi, is around agriculture.
- Yeah.
- Right, we've been working with wine producers, of all things, to adopt using 5G with IoT sensors to help things like water distribution. How do I optimize my growing and harvesting cycle and ensure consistency in wine year over year pretty darn important if this is the industry that you're working in.
- Yeah, I mean, every, every piece that you mentioned has just blown my mind. There's some things in there that I wouldn't even have thought of that can use 5G and really are just incredible and so useful for our society as a whole. Thank you so much, Mo. This was very insightful stuff. I really hope you have a good rest of your weekend. Hopefully you get to tune into our CES coverage, but it was great having you here today.
- It's great to seeing you as well.
- Thanks.