 from the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Hello, I'm Maribel Lip as the founder of Lip has Research and I am here today at the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco and I have the great pleasure and honor of interviewing Maison Gilbert, who is the VP of Advanced Technology and Systems at AT&T. We've been talking a lot today and welcome Maison. Thank you Maribel for having us. We've been talking a lot today about 5G. 5G is like the first and foremost topic on a lot of people's mind that came to the event today. But I thought we might step back for those that aren't as familiar with 5G and maybe we could do a little 5G 101 with Maison. What's going on with 5G? Tell us about what 5G is and why it's so important to our future. 5G is not an allergy. It is, it really is a transformational and a revolution and really to not, to what we're doing as a company but to society and humanity in general. It would really free us to be mobile, untethered and to explore new experiences that we've never had before. So is it just, do I think of this as just faster 4G because we had 2G than 3G than 4G? Is 5G something different when you say allows us to be mobile and untethered? Don't we already have that? No, we don't. There are a lot of experiences that are not possible to do today. So imagine that having multiple teenagers experiencing virtual reality, augmented reality, all mobile while they are in the car all in different countries. We can't have that kind of an experience today. Imagine cars as we move towards autonomous cars. We cannot do autonomous cars today without the intelligence, the speed and the latency with 5G so that all cars connect and talk to each other in a split of a second. See I think that's one of the real benefits of this concept of 5G. So when you talk about 5G, 5G is yes, more bandwidth but also lower latency and that's gonna allow the things that you're talking about. I know that you also mentioned things such as telemedicine and first net network. Any other examples that you're seeing that you think are really gonna add a difference to people's lives going forward as they look at 5G? So 5G is a key enabler in terms of how things, how these experiences are going to really be transformed but when you bring in 5G with the edge compute because now today think of compute and storage and security and everything is sitting somewhere and as you are talking something goes to some unknown place in the 5G era with the edge, think of compute and storage as following you. Okay, so you're your own data center. You pretty much your own data centers and wherever you go with every corner there is a data center following you right there and now add to that we're transforming our network to be programmable with our software defined network and add AI into that bringing all of this diamond together, the 5G, the edge, programming the network with software defined and AI and that is what the new experiences is. This is when you'll start seeing really an autonomous world, a world in which that we're able to experience drones flying and repairing cell sites or repairing oil tanks without us really being involved about from being in a living room watching a movie. This is a world that is an extremely fascinating world, a world in which that people can interact and experience family reunion all virtually in the same room, but they're all in different countries. I do think there's this breakthrough power of connectivity. You know, we've talked about it in the next generation of telemedicine. You mentioned some of the dangerous jobs that we'd be able to use drones for not just for sort of hovering over people's gorgeous monuments or other things that we've seen as the initial deployment, something that's really meaningful. Now I know the other topic that has come up quite a bit is this topic of open source and you're in the advanced technology group. And sometimes I think that people don't equate the concept of open source with large established organizations like an AT&T, but yet you made the case that this was foundational and critical for your innovation. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, open source is really part of our DNA. If you look at the inventions of the UNIX, you see C++ all originated from AT&T labs and Bell Labs. We've always been part of that open source community, but really in the past five years, I think open sources moved to a completely another level because now we're not talking about just open source. We're talking about open platforms. We're talking about open APIs. What that means is that we're now- A lot of open here. Everything open in here. And what that really means is that we no longer as one company, no one company in the world can make it on their own. The world- Okay, this is a big difference. It's a big difference. The world is getting smaller and companies together for us to really drive this transformational experiences, companies need to collaborate and work with each other. And this is really what open source is, is that think of what we've done with our software-defined network, what we call it own app in the open source. We started as a one company. And there was another, the Chinese, one of the Chinese mobile companies also had a source code in there. In the past one year, we now have over a hundred companies, some of the biggest brand companies or collaborating to building open APIs. Why the open source and open API is important. Enables collaboration, expedite innovation. We've done more in the past one year than what we could have done alone for 10 years. And that's really the power of open source and open platforms. I totally agree with you on this one. One of the things that we've really seen happen is as newer companies, these theoretically innovative companies have come online, cloud native companies. They've been very big on this open proponent, but we're also seeing large established companies move in the same direction. And it's allowing every organization to have that deeply innovative, flexible architecture that allows them to build new services without things breaking. So I think it's very exciting to see the breadth of companies that you had on stage talking about this and the breadth of companies that are now in that. And the other thing that's interesting about it is they're competitors as well, right? So there's that little bit of edgy co-opetition that's happening, but it's interesting to see that everybody feels that there's room for intense innovation in that space as well. So we've talked a little bit about open source. We've talked about 5G. You are in advanced technology, and I think we'd be remiss to not talk about the big two-letter acronym that's in the room that's not 5G, which would be AI. Tell me what's going on with AI. How are you guys thinking about it? What advice do you have for other organizations that are approaching it? Because you are actually a huge developer of AI across your entire organization. So maybe you could tee up a little bit about how that works. Yeah, AI is transformational and fundamental for AT&T. And we have always developed AI solutions, and we were the first to deploy AI in call centers 20 years ago. 20 years ago, really? 20 years ago. You were doing AI 20 years ago. See, this just goes to show. 20 years ago. I mean, AI really, if you go to the source of AI, it really goes in the 40s and 50s with pioneers like Shannon and others. But the first deployment in a commercial call center, not a pilot, was really by AT&T with a service we called it How May I Help You. And the reason we put that out, because our customers were annoyed with press 1 for this and press 2 for billing, they wanted to speak naturally. And so that we put the system that says, how may I help you? And how may I help you? Allow the customer to really tell us in their own language, their own words, what is it that they want from us, as opposed to really dictating to them what they have to say. Now, today, it's really very hard for you to call any company in the world without getting a service that uses some form of speech recognition or speech understanding. Thankfully. Thankfully. But where we are applying it today and have been for the past two, three years, we're finding some really amazing opportunities that we've never imagined before. AI in its press, in its essence, is nothing more than automation, leveraging data. So using your data as the oil, as the foundation, and driving automation, and that automation could be complete automation of a service or it could be helping a human to doing their job better and faster. It could be helping a doctor in finding information about patients that they couldn't have done by themselves by processing a million records altogether. We're doing the same thing at AT&T. The network is the most complex project ever to be created on the planet. And it's a complex projects that require, that changes every second of the day as people move around and they try different devices. And so that to be able to optimize that experience is really an AI problem. So we apply it today to identify where to build the next cell sites, all the way to what's the right to add to show to the customer, or how do we really make your life easier with our services without you really calling our call center? How do I diagnose and repair your setup box before you're calling us? All of that foundation is really starting to be driven by AI technologies. Very exciting. Well, I'm actually very excited to see where AI takes us and I'm excited to hear about what you're doing in the future. Thanks for taking the time to come here today and be with us on my queue. It's always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. I'm Maribel Lopez, closing out at AT&T Spark. Thank you.