If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?
In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed.
But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.
It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.
I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.
What did they miss the first time?
The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.
Listen on the BBC app or wherever you get your podcasts.
One of the reasons I've enjoyed the Revisionist History Partnership with T-Mobile for Business is that every time I sit down for one of our periodic conversations I learn something I would otherwise have not even thought about.
The conversation you're about to hear falls into that category.
In fact, as I introduce it to you, it sounds like the start of a three guys walk into a bar joke.
It was a top executive from CNN, Guy Griggs, Steve Douglas from Siemens Energy, the person who runs the maintenance operations for one of the biggest power companies in the United States, and Mo Kadaba, the chief marketing officer for T-Mobile for Business.
We sat down together in New York City not long ago and we talked about something called slicing, a technology T-Mobile uses to help ensure that when someone absolutely needs a strong network connection, they can get a strong network connection.
5G network slicing strengthens trust and connections across worldwide industries.
Think about this next time you see a CNN correspondent reporting from some far-flung remote location.
Or there's a massive blackout and you're waiting for someone to get the power back on.
What you see in both those cases is a professional doing their job.
What you don't see is a technology network behind the scenes that makes it possible for them to do their job.
This conversation is about telling the story of that invisible technological infrastructure.
I found it fascinating, and I'm sure you will too.
There's two ideas I want to explore today.
The first one is something that I've been struck by, and I'm sure all of you guys have been struck by, which is that the benefits to technological advancement are largely hidden.
In other words, only insiders kind of know what the implications of them are.
From the outside.
You can't observe from the outside and know how it changes a specific field unless you're in the field.
So one of the things I want to do today is have people in the field tell me about all the unexpected ways in which technology changes our business.
And the larger theme though, is that we're going to be talking a lot today about infrastructure and this idea that infrastructure is more than simply a kind of passive tool, structural participant in innovation.
But I want to start with Mo.
We're here today because we're talking about something special that T-Mobile for Business is doing from a technological standpoint.
I want you to describe what it is sort of to set up our conversation and to give us an example from your own world about how that's made a difference.
Thank you.
First and foremost, great to be here with you today and it's great to see you again.
So what T-Mobile and T-Mobile for Business have been doing is innovating our network and creating the most advanced 5g network frankly, in america and likely on the planet, we call it 5g advanced capabilities and then, with our business customers, we're really bringing this capability to life.
That's called slicing and, to your point, this is a term that not everyone knows.
They don't know what it does and slicing is just a way of thinking about hey, if you have a network, Can you take a slice of that network and create specific performance characteristics via that slice to ensure that businesses are able to drive the outcomes that are important to them?
As an example, at the Formula One in Las Vegas that happened a few weeks ago in November.
That portion of that network, that slice, can be used for things like ticketless entry to speed up 300000 people getting in so that they can enjoy the sport and the action.
It can be used for back office operations, all the people working behind the scenes.
They may be using push-to-talk devices.
They may be using point-of-sale to make a sale.
How do you ensure that that transaction, that traffic, that push-to-talk click happens when you have hundreds of thousands of people all in a small, limited space?
And the answer to that is you dedicate a slice or a portion of the network to that mission.
And so slicing can be used for so many different things.
As you mentioned, we're here with our friends from CNN, from Siemens Energy.
The ways that it can be used frankly, are limitless and are really, really built to think through.
How can T-Mobile understand the pain points that our customers have, smash those pain points and help you deliver very specific outcomes.
That's slicing.
A couple of questions about slicing before we get into Siemens Energy and CNN.
First off, I want to dedicate a slice because that's a way of what?
Ensuring the reliability of those transactions?
Exactly.
So what's beautiful about slicing is it gives us the ability to use multiple knobs and levers.
One can be dedicating a piece.
One can be increasing the reliability or the performance of the network to adapt to the needs in real time.
Others can be, and we're getting a little bit more technical here, but latency.
How quickly is that transaction happening?
How quickly are you talking to the network and that signal coming back?
Some transactions require super low latency, and that's another knob we can turn.
But at the heart of it, you can think about reliability and ensuring that the network adapts in real time to the needs of the business.
When did you guys start to develop slicing?
This is how new?
Great, great question.
So T-Mobile was the first company in America to deploy what's called 5G standalone.
And 5G standalone enabled this set of capabilities.
The first slice at scale that we deployed was with F1 in Las Vegas three years ago.
And ever since then, there's been Ryder Cop and Major League Baseball All-Star Week, as an example.
All of these things have used slicing capability to ensure that the business can do what they want.
And is it an evolving technology?
In other words, is the slicing of today better than the slicing of two years ago?
Yeah, wonderful question.
Just in 2025, we announced two very major first of their kind slices in the U.S.
One that we launched in February of 2025 is called T-Priority.
And really what that does is provides a slice for first responders and those folks that support our first responder communities.
Because, at the end of the day, what matters to police and fire and EMS, emergency medical is ensuring that the network is working for them at those times when an emergency is happening, when lots of first responders may be showing up at the same time to a given scene.
So giving them the capacity that they need in real time and expanding it to support the number of first responders that are showing up.
And then the second major slice that we launched this year is one called SuperMobile.
And it's actually the one that both CNN and Siemens Energy are using.
And we're going to get into that, I think, a bit more.
Yeah, yeah.
Guy, tell us a little bit about what you do at CNN and how you came to be interested in working with T-Mobile and using this super slice.
Yeah, sure.
So I oversee all of our partnerships, advertising relationships across the country.
I'm all about coming up with smart solutions that drive better business outcomes for our partners and our advertisers.
We're going through this pivotal moment of transformation and I'm glad to be overseeing the ad business as we embark upon this.
How has technology altered the way you do your work?
Oh, yeah.
I mean just taking a step back.
The media landscape has changed drastically over the last, let's say, 13 years or so.
You know, back in 2012, it was all about cable and broadcast TV.
It was all about satellite trucks and fixed locations.
And for me, it was all about trying to get as much money to monetize those mediums as possible.
Now, whether it's podcasts or newsletters or streaming or linear and cable or events, there are a million ways of reaching our audience.
And the landscape has just gotten so much more splintered and fragmented.
So now what we have to do is really meet audiences where they're at.
And for me, I have to monetize all of those formats and platforms and mechanisms in a way that actually drives the business.
So that's, I'd say, the biggest change.
And with that, also, we're becoming a digital-first, direct-to-consumer brands.
And so we're creating these standalone products that actually reach audiences across every screen device and platform and reaches them where they're at.
And that gets really interesting when you're dealing with marketers like T-Mobile and delivering their messages in new and innovative ways.
I'm curious about the first conversations you had with T-Mobile.
What was the problem that you defined that you wanted to solve?
And how did you see slicing as fitting into this solution that you imagined?
So, as we embark upon this digital transformation and to basically transform CNN into a brand of the future, we're trying to define the future of news.
And so, with that, our reporters really need to stay connected.
You know, reporting live from a natural disaster, or you know at a moment of celebration like New Year's Eve or Super Bowl or July 4th or Thanksgiving or whatever that might be, or if they're in far-flung places, you know where there's not a good signal.
We need to ensure that our audience gets delivered the information that matters most to them and does not skip a beat.
And so, as we're embarking upon this digital transformation, it only made sense to outfit our reporters with the best technology in the palm of their hands to ensure that they're capturing that information as it happens, in real time.
With breaking news, you're either leading or you're following.
And for us to have a competitive edge In this digital transformation that we're going upon.
It was critical for us to have a trusted partner that was able to capture news reliably, so that we don't break trust with our audiences and deliver what they need.
I want you to jump in here, because one of the interesting things here is that when you're speaking Guy, I've been a journalist my whole life.
I'm well aware of all the limitations of the various technologies I've used over the years.
But the thing is, I have no insight into what is possible technologically, right?
I just know what I've been given.
So I'm just curious how does the process of educating a company like CNN into what's technologically possible work?
Did someone at T-Mobile like call a guy up and say hey, do you guys realize?
There's this thing out there that you may not have heard of?
Like, I'm curious about how knowledge gets diffused in these marketplaces.
What I loved about working with them is like any large enterprise.
It's a little bit of prove it to me and show it to me.
And so, when Supermobile hadn't yet even launched, when we started talking to CNN but we knew that frontline journalism was such an incredible use case for all the reasons the guy articulated that hey, when breaking news is happening, the camera that you have and the video camera that you have in your pocket on your phone may be that first way of that breaking news making it to the audience.
And so we sat down and we were having a conversation about how slicing – would enable, even in moments of congestion and moments of emergency, would give them the intelligent adaptive connectivity that they need for their frontline to be able to stream, as well as all of those the big moments like 4th of July, New Year's Eve, et cetera.
And so what happened was they said, okay, prove it.
So we gave them X number of test devices.
They embedded them with video crews and news crews around the country.
And then they put it to the stress test.
They went and ran side-by-side compares.
Oh, really?
You did a test?
Oh, yeah, we did a test before we embarked upon this.
We needed to make sure that the technology actually worked.
Tell me a little bit about the test.
We had engineers and field journalists using the technology and just seeing whether the signal was stronger than some of the other partners that we work with telecommunications companies.
And it proved out- Who shall remain nameless.
Yes, we won't name their names, but it proved to work and it proved to be steady and it gave our tech and product teams the confidence and our newsroom to actually say let's embark upon this.
Let's outfit all of our field journalists with this technology, because it's going to be critical in our news gathering and news reporting.
So it's like you're at some event and there's some news.
I can imagine there are moments when there's 100 reporters in a scene and the networks might be incredibly congested.
Yeah, it was both about congestion and areas with lots of demand.
Like New York City was one of the areas where the tests were happening.
It's important not only from a journalism standpoint, but it was important for a T-Mobile and CNN relationship standpoint.
It allowed us to deepen our relationship because it's a win-win-win.
And it kind of sets a blueprint for how we want to be working with T-Mobile more in the future.
You know, the satellite to cell security that our journalists have while they're out in the field enables them to do the job that they need to do better than anybody else.
Our audience wins because they don't skip a beat.
And then T-Mobile gets the opportunity to show up in a very meaningful and authentic way, in a trusted way where the audience knows that you know What they're seeing right now is powered by this incredible technology.
And so it's something that we think is a never-been-done-before watershed and really demonstrative of where we want to go as a company moving forward.
I remember when I was starting out as a reporter for The Washington Post, I was given a what was called a trash 80, a Radio Shack like calling it a computer is too way too flattering.
And it had two cups.
Do you remember the cups?
You ran to a payphone and you put the cups on, Each of the two things.
And then you use tones.
And if you were covering a big event, there'd be like three payphones like half a mile away.
And then there'd be a line of reporters waiting to use that.
And if you're trying to beat the competition, you just wouldn't leave the payphone.
Yeah.
You just stick there and make the New York Times wait.
I worked for the Washington Post.
Malcolm, you're dating yourself.
This technology allows our reporters to literally have a satellite truck in their hands, so they're not dealing with cups and strings and waiting on lines for other reporters to finish.
I'll give you a real example that was playing out at F1, which is the photographers from any news outlets.
Their workflow was they would take pictures and then they would hand their SD card, the memory card from inside the camera to a runner.
The runner would then literally run to somewhere to upload the photos.
What we're able to do with slicing technology is we've launched a solution that plugs directly into the camera and uses the slice and the 5G network so that, in real time, every photo that's being taken is moving over file transfer protocol to an FTP site.
The editors are then able to grab it, which means breaking news is able to happen even faster.
And they're able to beat the competition to whatever that is iconic.
Next image will be in getting it out to to the eyes everywhere.
Yeah steve, i'm sorry we've.
I feel we've been, we've been ignoring you.
Before i get into the way siemens energy has worked with t-mobile, i'm curious about your own background.
I'm assuming you're an.
Are you an engineer?
You're an engineer, i'm an engineer.
Yep originally yeah um, and what kind of engineer Actually?
Marine engineer.
Interesting.
How would you describe your current job with Siemens Energy?
I've got a great job with Siemens Energy.
So my organization, my teams, we service the power plants across the United States.
Power plants, no different than your car.
Every so often, they have to do periodic maintenance.
We show up with a crew of people, take the turbines, the generators apart, stem to stern, inspect them, repair them, modernize them, upgrade them and then return them to service to help power America.
So last year Siemens Energy announced equipment generated about 25 of electricity used in the United States.
There's over 2,200 units spread out across 1,100 sites in 48 states.
2,200 units?
Correct.
How many people work for you?
In my organization?
Yeah.
I have about 1,500, and then I bring on about another 3,000 contractors every year.
Oh, wow.
Basically, if a generator goes down somewhere or a power plant goes down somewhere, you're the person who gets called.
That's correct.
How did you come to want to work with T-Mobile for business?
Tell me how that came about.
What was it they offered you that you needed?
We have teams on site.
So when we go to a power plant, a small event for us might be 30 people on a site for 30 days.
A big event for us could be 300 people on site for six months.
And it's all about that.
You might be on a site for as long as six months.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Over the course of that six months, what are you doing?
You're essentially taking it, you're taking the whole thing down and going through it?
Yeah, take it apart, rebuild it.
There might've been some sort of damage to the equipment, waiting on other parts to show up.
We've had events that have taken over a year on different sites.
But for our people on site you were kind of comparing and contrasting history and we used to have to show up with boxes and boxes of drawings and manuals.
And the connectivity that we get now lets our people access our engineers globally, whether they're sitting in Germany India, the US,
It allows them to talk to the factories.
It allows them to access drawings, process, procedure.
But then it also does things like lets us run payroll.
I mean, you know it enables everything to happen, because when we show up at these plants, you know we show up office trailers bathrooms cranes tools, parts.
You know, none of it exists when we show up and none of it's there when we leave.
And we do that 300 times a year.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So logistically, what you're running is something incredibly complicated.
So walk me through.
You've got this group of you say as many as you say as many as 60 or 300 was the- Yeah.
Potentially at a site.
Yeah.
So you show up and walk me through what the first couple of steps are and how this kind of connectivity would make a difference.
I mean, we hire union workers.
We're partnered with the UBC and hire them to write.
So first thing is sign up.
Then it's go to safety training, go to site orientation training.
Customer will bring the unit down.
Lock out, tag out.
Make sure that all the systems are safe to work on.
Then take the machine apart.
As the machine's coming apart, you're inspecting every piece.
Is it in the condition it should be?
Is it worn?
Is it broken?
Does it need to be replaced?
Are we modernizing it?
These machines are how big, in a sense?
From what I work on, on a small side, it's about 80 megawatts.
On the large size, up to like 1,500 megawatts.
So 1,500 megawatts power a million and a half homes.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, there's nothing we work on that you're moving with hand.
Everything's being moved with a crane.
Yeah.
You're dealing with a complex piece of machinery.
You're a German-based company.
You had to show up with boxes and boxes of manuals.
And you had to be in communication with people who presumably designed the machines back in Europe.
Yep.
Talk a little bit about the difficulties of that earlier paradigm.
Going to the earliest parts of my career.
If you wanted to send a picture or a sketch of what you found at the site, you actually had to send it by mail and turn it around, and then you could fax it.
And then, all of a sudden, you could attach a digital picture to an electronic communication.
And now, with this technology, we can live stream in 4K and hey, this is what I'm looking at.
Do you see this?
Okay, hey, I want to see from this view.
And the technology just allows that real-time communication, regardless of where the people are sitting, collaboration as well as access to all the technical information.
Yeah.
What's the big payoff for you?
Is it that you can now speed up the process of doing this kind of maintenance?
Absolutely.
For the customer, the owner of the power plant, whether it's a utility, an independent power producer or some sort of municipality, bringing that unit back sooner is beneficial to them.
Getting my crews off site sooner saves me money, lets me send them to another site.
So it's all about the speed.
And you know, the last thing we want to be slowed down with is communicating with engineering.
Getting that technical answer, you know, getting that support.
You know, I need whatever environment my people are working at to seem like they're sitting at headquarters and have access to all the same information.
Yeah.
So T-Mobile gives you now able to equip all of those technicians with essentially, a dedicated slice, a super mobile dedicated slice.
Yeah.
And you know, as you can imagine, you know maybe, unlike where people are reporting, you know everything that we're happening is kind of more remote.
You know, your power plants aren't generally found in and your city centers and your hubs.
So it's that connectivity, whether it's 5G or satellite, lots of different options but it's connecting our people to what they need.
And how did you find out about Supermobile?
It was kind of an initially organic conversation.
They came to us, said, hey, we think we've got something for you.
We're always trying to get our people that bandwidth on site.
And we brought them a problem like, what can you do?
And that's what started the conversation.
For T-Mobile, I mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating.
We start with, what are our customers' pain points?
And we knew with Siemens Energy, remote workforce, worker safety, efficiency were things that were incredibly important.
And so it was.
We were designing and building super mobile as a solution.
We really thought through what customers, what industries do we think will really benefit from this value proposition and these pain points that we can come smash.
And this is why the conversations with cnn around frontline journalists began.
This is why the conversations with siemens energies around remote workers working in some of the most remote parts of america began.
And it was so exciting for us to see that yeah, there was a there there and we could really help our customers win.
The case studies, you've got like F1.
Yeah.
You've got like frontline journalists reporting on.
You've got like the power plants that we can't live without.
In rolling out something like this, do you choose early case studies that you think will kind of capture the attention of?
I mean, there seems to be an art behind who you are.
This is why I love business and B2B.
I mean like just listening to these stories about solutions that are serving americans, whether the end consumer that's receiving the electricity or the power of the energy, or the person at home or on the go who's consuming news content, like everything in our lives, in some way is touched by business, and so, absolutely when we're building any solution, we're always thinking about okay, what are the pain points, What are the specific verticals or industries that could benefit from this?
And then, because we're deep in the B2B, we're able to bring industry experts to the table internally and trusted partners and customers to have a conversation on hey, does this really achieve and smash the pain point that you have?
And so the answer is, yeah, absolutely.
And it's a lot of fun too.
We'll be right back.
If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?
In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed.
But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.
It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.
I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.
What did they miss the first time?
The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.
Listen on the BBC app or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
Who needs this technology?
Who hasn't adopted it?
What I love about super mobile is that there's three key capabilities.
So let's start there.
One is the slicing that we've talked a lot about.
And I think of that as intelligent, adaptive connectivity that meets the performance and real-time requirements of businesses.
The second one that we haven't gotten to very much is built-in security to ensure that, as part of any layered cybersecurity defense posture that our businesses are taking, we're helping protect also at the network layer.
And then the third one is the satellite capabilities that allow people to communicate from anywhere that they're at.
And, as I think about that, the one that we haven't really gotten into is events concerts uh, political conventions, things like that, where the slicing elements of it, i think really really um, can help.
And then, on the satellite side, i still think there's opportunities around workers that are deeply remote outside of energy.
Government employees in like, national parks is an example that couldn't use the satellite capabilities in their everyday job and really for safety purposes, to make sure that in one way or another, they're always on the grid.
Steve, I had to come back to you for a moment.
I'm curious about, as you've kind of experienced this technology and have thought about how it affects your workflow and all these things.
Do you, is there a point at which you start to reimagine what your, these job sites look like?
I ask this question only because I remember we did a T-Mobile conversation once with these firefighters.
Do you remember those guys?
Oh, yes.
And the firefighters were completely rethought the way they fought fires once they had this technology, because they would go, instead of having everything from Directed from a command center off-site, they would just put a server in the back of a pickup truck and go directly to the fire site and have all the decisions made there, because now they had connectivity.
So this, what seemed like a relatively simple shift in the infrastructure, completely changed the way they thought about it.
Firing fighters fighting fires.
And all of a sudden, the firefighters on the scene had to make were able to make all kinds of decisions they never made before.
I'm curious about.
Could you talk about?
You must've thought about wait a second.
This means I could do this, this and this that I've never done before.
Yeah, the idea of a tablet in an engineer or a technician or a craftsman's hand with the work instructions, the ability to pull a drawing, versus walking back to a trailer to do that, and then the ability to really just collaborate on the deck plates with an engineering organization, be it in Europe or somewhere else.
It's all right in your hands, and that goes into changing and streamlining what we're doing on the customer sites and ultimately, eliminating things.
That's really interesting.
Give me a concrete example of a step you could eliminate.
One example I love is the see what I see.
Right.
If we were inspecting a row of blades instead of me going through and documenting what each blade is, taking pictures of it.
Go through and write a meticulous report.
Hey, I just visually inspected these.
I'm going to let you visually inspect them with me.
Okay hey, they're acceptable as is, versus getting into dimensioning and visual inspections just to communicate to an engineering organization.
Yeah, yeah.
Like with the camera on the phone, via super mobile.
Now, literally you can to use a consumer term FaceTime in someone, an expert, and let them in real time see what the technician on site is seeing and assist them.
Guy, is there a point where we start to reimagine what covering an event looks like when we radically improve the kind of underlying technology?
Connectivity.
We launched last month a new streaming service.
It's this adaptive live news experience that's designed for the modern news consumer.
Live when it matters, deep when it counts, available anytime, anywhere.
It's basically having the entire CNN experience in the palm of your hand on the phone.
And with that it's going to afford us the opportunity to do some really cool things with our journalists.
We think in this new age of AI, headlines are going to be commoditized.
You can get them anytime, anyplace, anywhere, right?
But people trust people.
And we have some of the biggest world-renowned journalists on the planet, like people that are anchors and reporters and that millions and millions of people really trust.
It's taking the news reporting to the next level.
These capabilities aren't afforded right now within this new streaming product, but they're on the roadmap in 2026.
And we're hoping that T-Mobile will be the underpinnings of technology that allow us to do all of that.
So that's taking it to the next level.
A question for all three of you.
What do you want next?
All of you have described a technology that allows an existing set of processes to be done much more reliably.
Is there something, what's on your wishlist?
Where could the technology go?
I love this question.
I mean, at the heart of it, slicing is replacing what used to take wires to do.
You mentioned it at the beginning, which was fixed locations and satellite trucks.
We talked about F1.
At the end of the day, over the last X number of decades, there has been this massive transition and transformation from needing to physically connect everything with a wire to now we can use slicing to emulate what wireline networks used to do on mobile networks.
So, as I think about what's next, it's really about how much more can wireline networks be disrupted to solve real challenges and create value for business customers.
And that's what I spend a lot of my time meddling on.
You haven't mentioned, Mo, I keep waiting for you to mention healthcare because I feel like the...
The implications here for healthcare are huge.
Yes, yes.
We talked actually once before a little bit about healthcare, but for healthcare, the way we think about it is one.
Emergency medical services are first responders.
That's right.
So they absolutely have access to and we see them using the T priority slice.
But then where the magic happens is the integration of that slicing technology for the moving vehicle, the tablets in the vehicle helping save lives, and the ability to transfer and transition that data off of the EMS solution directly into the hospital or the healthcare facility where they're showing up.
And I have multiple examples I could take you through of hospitals that have deployed 5G purpose-built coverage, usually to replace something like Wi-Fi, to enable massive amounts of data much faster, at lower latency, fully integrated with the EMS community around them to do their thing.
I had a conversation, a heartbreaking conversation, with a guy, an ER doc in Chicago who was training kids in the kind of rudimentary principles of first response.
Because on the south side of Chicago, it's the public who comes upon a gunshot victim first, right?
And there might be a five or ten minute window where some civilian is just sitting with the body and he was trying to teach them about, you know, compress the wound or whatever.
But i can imagine, couldn't you?
Couldn't you imagine a universe where they just take their phone out, exactly and you know, and take a picture of a video of everything and that's sent immediately to somebody who could tell them in real time what to do exactly?
We're thinking about the semen's energy example of what i see.
Yeah, but I fundamentally believe and know that over time, what we're going to have is just overlays.
So you're going to use the camera on your phone and on your phone, as you're pointing at something, it will show you the schematics, or it will show you how to help a patient in real time with instructions.
So someone can be holding it, someone else can be looking at it and it tells you the thing where i thought you were going to go with the thing we have not yet talked about, which in this year, we haven't talked about ai at all.
That was good.
That was my next.
That was my next.
I had a.
It was.
I thought that steve would be the natural one to, because clearly that's you were talking about connecting to the guy back in germany.
Yes, but maybe the thing that you're doing with your, with this connectivity, is bringing in ai and having diagnostics that way.
Right, am i right?
We don't know what we don't know yet with it.
But the promise of just, we've got years worth of running data.
We've got years worth of inspection reports.
How do you overlay those two together and have AI start doing smarter maintenance, doing more predictive maintenance, deferring maintenance based off of what we can see with the AI?
But just getting ready for what?
The infrastructure and the power to build this next wave of AI for the US.
It's what's driving our industry right now.
The data demands of having a kind of open interaction with I'm assuming they're far greater than interaction with a human being.
In other words, if I'm Steve or I'm one of Steve's people and I'm on site and I have some problem And I want to be able to contact the specialist in Germany, or I want to have access to an LLM, that's like got all the manuals in.
One is much more data intensive than the other, right?
Absolutely.
It really boils down to are you using text?
Are you using voice or are you using video?
Because the AI compute itself.
That's its own server, its own mechanism.
That's sitting and processing.
But then the mechanism by which you're bringing that information to and from is where it gets more intensive, based on the modality that you're using.
So if it's a chat AI, it could be relatively limited bandwidth.
That's required voice a bit more and then video the most.
Yeah, yeah.
Guy, have you thought about that in the context of – is that a challenge or a question that comes up at CNN?
With AI specifically or with just the future of reporting?
No, because I was thinking in this conversation.
You know we're talking about – what we're really talking about with all of these conversations is we are making – we are increasing the sophistication of the point of connection between whoever has this – device or whatever and the problem they're trying to solve.
And with journalists.
That's an incredibly fascinating question, because you can imagine a situation where someone is observing something and AI is helping them understand what they're seeing.
I agree.
I think that all of these advances in technology are just going to enable us to do what we do on steroids much, much better.
It's also going to enable us to potentially provide value or utility to the general public and society.
So, just getting back to the thing like allowing us to do things better, we defined real-time journalism on cable TV 45 years ago.
We were the first network to have 24-7 news.
And that costs a lot of money. to do, right?
Yeah.
And so what we're hoping is, with all of these advances in technology and literally not needing those satellite trucks, and not needing that camera crew, and literally having all of this in the palm of your hand, it'll allow us to do that much more efficiently.
And then lastly, I would say, with the utility piece, which is kind of you know, this hasn't been vetted, this is just my thoughts.
Like, let's say, we are running towards the fire or running towards the flood and we're the first on location and we see people that are in need.
Is there a way that we, through Super Mobile, can connect to the local EMS or could assess what's going on and say there's a need for X, Y and Z in this moment?
So we're not just reporting what's going on, but we're also able to help solve for whatever disaster or problem is happening at any time.
So that's kind of like the next step where, you know, this could take place.
I was thinking of war reporting.
About war reporting, which is the most confusing and kind of mistake prone.
The idea that a reporter on the scene could be taking video and having you know, identify that was that plane.
You see, was this kind of plane that belonged to this country and not that country.
And that missile you see was this kind of missile.
That kind of thing improves the fidelity of the on-site reporter and has all kinds of ripple effects downstream right.
Because we have a less corrupted data from the source.
Totally.
Yeah, yeah.
We should probably wrap up, but there's a couple of themes I wanted to kind of end on.
The first one is that the effects of technological innovation are unpredictable and unknowable.
I don't imagine.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
When you guys were coming up with slicing and with super mobile, you did not anticipate all the ways in which the technology could be used by your customers.
You had some of it, a sense, I think, probably.
But when you listen to Guy and Steve, Am I right?
You hear things that you didn't think that was what it was going to be about.
That's exactly right.
I mean again thinking about the arc of time here.
20 years ago no one predicted slicing was coming.
You know, arguably five years ago no one saw the rise of AI in the way that it's actually played out, from about three years ago.
But yeah, as we're building mobile networks and as we're thinking about the future of now, 5G to 6G, and what are those use cases and how can they serve businesses.
100%.
It's these sorts of conversations on, hey, what's going on in your business?
And what challenges are you dealing with and what are you trying to fix or address this year?
That then gives us the ideas of how can we shape the technology and build the technology in a way that addresses the need.
Point number two.
Reflection number two from our conversation is that the systems that we have built as a modern economy are probably a lot less efficient than we think.
In other words, we assume we're doing a pretty good job.
Then a new technology comes along.
We're like, oh, actually, you could do it way better.
Right.
So just when you think you've optimized a system, you think that, oh, I send the reporter.
I got a satellite truck behind the reporter.
We're fine.
This is the way we do news.
And actually, no, there's a way better.
Yeah.
You know, super mobile will enable vertical video, which is becoming really hot right now.
It's the predominant way that people are consuming video on social media, etc.
We're just getting into that game and we're going to be able to tell these visually arresting stories in live format in vertical video mobile-first storytelling, leveraging that.
And I think the future, you know, the best is yet to come.
I have no idea what it will avail, but...
I already see some future applications of where this could go.
Yeah.
And then the third thing and maybe the most important thing is the thing I alluded to earlier is we are working towards a new definition of trust here, that we've been thinking about trust for generations now as being about transparency and fairness and predictability.
But now we're adding this fourth component of reliability.
I can reduce the number of you know, catastrophic power outages or system breakdowns.
I can reduce the error rate of a journalist, the scene of a thing.
And that that may be that new additional, that new way of addressing reliability can enhance trust, you know, maybe as much as the other sort of three traditional pillars of trust enhancement, which is a very, very intriguing thought.
Anyway, thank you,
This has been fascinating.
Thanks to all of you.
An unlikely pairing that proves not so unlikely in the end.
Thanks so much, Michael.
Good seeing you. at iHeartMedia.
This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan, editing by Karen Shikurji.
Mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.
It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.
I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.
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Listen on the BBC app or wherever you get your podcasts.
