 I'm your host, Jamie Scato-Cotaia, founder and CEO of JSA. Today, we are exploring the topic that's on the minds of many here, the buzzword of the year someone say AI. Joining us is Sunil Diaz, he's the CEO of Aleppo, a leader reimagining the future of customer support in the telecommunications industry. Sunil, welcome. Jamie, thank you for having me. Our pleasure. I should say this is not just a buzzword. Buzzword could be very misleading here. AI, life-changing innovation, that technology leaders are truly embracing, which really is a nice line up here to Aleppo. Can you tell us what you guys are doing there at Aleppo? Sure. Artificial intelligence, generative AI and machine learning is going to have a profound impact on many aspects of our lives and on every industry vertical. What I'm stating is not news, it's all over the press. Every technology company today is talking about AI in one form or the other in their earnings call and press releases. This is probably my fourth or fifth massive business transformation in the telecommunications industry vertical that I have experience in over the last 25 years. Now AI brings the promise of further transformation of this very entrenched and mature industry, largely underpinned by technologies such as 5G, a cloud network computing, IOT and multi-edge computing. Aleppo has a 20-year history in delivering software solutions to leading communication service providers around the world. I took over the role of CEO of Aleppo last October. I came from a much bigger company and was excited to join this very entrepreneurial culture with really a 20-year-old startup mindset doing some exciting work in the area of generative AI, 5G, edge computing and cloud-native solutions. Well, I know the company is, I know some of your other business leaders in the company, an incredible, like you said, 20-year-old mindset of a startup. Like you just love that, very innovative, great people there. You have a great story to tell, such as the latest news that you guys just released with your partner Loom Mobile, SaskTel's innovative all-digital mobile brand. Can you tell us how Aleppo is leveraging GenAI to insert really more realistic interactions for its customers with that story there? Yes. Before I get into AI, let me provide some background and context. Loom Mobile is an MVNO, and for those not familiar with the acronym, a Mobile Virtual Network Operator is a telecommunication service provider. Typically, a mobile service provider that does not own spectrum or license or a network, but sells mobile services under its brand name using the network of a licensed mobile operator. Now, there are many examples of this around the world. So big brands that are selling mobile services, such as Virgin Mobile, a brand that's associated with an airline, that's leveraging its massive customer base and brand, and it typically partners with mobile network operators or MNOs. Yes, I know the industry is full of acronyms. So MNOs is a mobile network operator in many countries to market and sell voice data and mobile broadband services. MVNO can also be launched by a mobile network operator itself, such as an AT&T or Orange, that might want to create a new sub-brand or an alternative brand to target some specific segment with a competitive offering. So Loom Mobile is such an MVNO that is launched, that was launched by Sastel, a mobile network operator, and their target being customers in the province of Saskatchewan and Canada, and they're seeking an alternative to their own traditional post-paid mobile services. The fascinating thing about Loom is the brand and what it's called. The brand is all about a love for connecting people through communications that want to make an impactful difference to the environment. One of Loom's initiatives is Bloom with Loom. So customer welcome and SIM packages that are mailed out to subscribers and customers, contain seeds of wildflowers for pollinators and an explanation of the benefits of planting those seeds. Now, I could spend all day talking about Loom and what they do, but I would encourage our audience to go directly to Loom's website that spelled L-U-M dot C-A to see what they're all about. One of my first customer visits after I took over as CEO at Aleppo was to do mobile to the team at Sastel in Regina, a relatively small city in the prairie province of Saskatchewan in Western Canada. I met with this amazing and ambitious team at Sastel that not only created the sustainability-based concept, but also launched Loom Mobile. What is probably one of the world's few, if not first 100 percent digital brand, NVNO, and certainly it's the only one in Canada. So it is a low-cost carrier that uses a membership model to acquire new customers. Their business model is quite unique. Their subscribers subscribe to a service and pay their bills by purchasing membership, and then turn to online forums to get their questions answered. The services obviously targeted to specific demographics, those wanting to manage their own phone services, and those that are in love with the environment. Being 100 percent digital brand, Loom operates exclusively through digital platforms such as mobile apps, websites, social media, and other online channels. Without any physical, retail, or offline services, there's no calling someone on the phone, being on hold, trying to find a retail location to go and get your mobile or cell phone services all done online through an app, simple, quick, and 100 percent digital self-serve. So I wanted to give you this background and context to tell you that Aleppo is proud and thankful to have been given this opportunity to partner with SASTEL to launch this 100 percent digital brand by deploying Aleppo's NVNO in a box, zero-touch digital network technology platform, and that was at the end of 2021, December 2021. So this brings me to the subject of Generative AI. So most recently, we partnered with Loom to launch Loombot, which is a Generative AI-powered customer care bot that's based on Aleppo's telco bot.ai. Unlike traditional chatbots that are constrained by preset rules, the Aleppo AI chatbot or virtual agent as we like to call it, is able to comprehend and engage in human-like customer service sessions through the use of LLMs or large language models. So Loombot understands nuanced subscriber interaction, delivering the ability to automate tasks without needing to escalate those tasks to a human agent, which is pretty typical with most chatbots. If you have experienced them, where you begin to engage with the chatbot, get frustrated, probably interact with an equally frustrating IVR, and finally end up with a human agent after being on hold for an extended time or waiting for someone to call you back. So Loombot, one of the other things is that the bot itself, because it's enabled by AI, it intelligently adapts to personas in real time. For example, it knows if you're interacting with someone that's looking to buy a new service with a prospect versus someone that's looking to buy, someone that's an existing subscriber who might have a question, and so it will respond based on the persona. And also being an AI-enabled bot, Loombot is adapting continuously learning and improving responses and making it more proficient in understanding human-like language. I love this. This is a story of the ultimate ideal partnership. First off, how wonderful that you gave a shout out to loom.calum.ca, their website, and then to create this Loombot to help them with their digital customer engagement based on your telcobot.ai virtual agent, which is one of the most amazing inventions of Aleppo from my perspective. So you're really revolutionizing digital customer interaction. It's incredible. Where do you see this going? Like what's the future like in digital customer interaction? So just imagine the realm of possibilities where AI can greatly enhance the digital brand value proposition or rather I should say the hundred percent digital brand value proposition. And that's what Loom talks about being a hundred percent digital brand. And we are probably in the first of, I would say nine innings and have just scratched the surface. A generative AI, Jamie, as you know, is a promising technology which was pioneered by OpenAI, Microsoft and Alphabet Google. But it has seen lower than expected adoption, I think largely due to the risk of inaccuracy and that is inherent in these large language models which are otherwise referred to as hallucinations. But this is disruptive technology. Given our history, Aleppo's history, longstanding history in the telecommunications service provider industry, we bring unique domain knowledge and we bring the expertise because of our domain knowledge, we are able to fine tune these AI models as well as do prompt engineering to reduce these hallucinations, improve accuracy and reduce the error rates to probably better than what human agents can accomplish. So that is Aleppo's secret sauce. I strongly believe there is more domain specialists like Aleppo are able to solve this problem of hallucination, of inaccuracy and identify interesting and new use cases like the virtual agent. I haven't even talked about the agent assist that's the other side of virtual agent of the virtual agent, but that's a topic for another discussion. I believe the adoption of generative AI in customer services expected to accelerate disrupting traditional customer service technologies and processes. So the days of rigid chatbots and frustrating IVRs are probably closer to the end of their technology life cycle. So I'm personally very excited for the future of AI and for what we are doing in Aleppo in making a sustainable impact. Yeah, so are we, so are we. And I know many of our viewers out there are also equally excited and highly interested viewers. If you wish, please do learn more at aleppo.com. You can actually scan the QR code over my shoulder here. Got it right. And make sure you go to aleppo.com to learn more. Thank you for joining us, Sunil Diaz, CEO of Aleppo. We so appreciate your time and insight. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. This has been great. And to our viewers guys, thanks so much for tuning in. And as always, happy networking.