Inside Out: A TM Forum podcast

In this episode of Inside Out, Mark Newman and Willie Stegmann speak with Vodafone Group CIO Ahmed El-Sayed about the transformation of the technology function in the AI era. Topics covered include how to bring AI across the entire software development lifecycle, people transformation and the changing roles of software engineers and architects, and building AI into customer journeys.

TM Forum members at this year's DTW Ignite 2026 demonstrated many examples of how AI adoption and autonomy have entered a new phase of adoption. They also debated how to address the challenges of effecting organizational change and implementing trustworthy AI at scale, as you will hear in this summary.
In keeping with the theme of AI deployment, TM Forum's AI agent, AIVA, drew on dozens of presentations and debates from the event to produce the summary. Meanwhile, Aaron Boasman-Patel, Vice President Innovation, TM Forum is the 'human in the loop' providing the curation and narration.

TM Forum members at this year's DTW Ignite 2026 demonstrated many examples of how AI adoption and autonomy have entered a new phase of adoption. They also debated how to address the challenges of effecting organizational change and implementing trustworthy AI at scale, as you will hear in this summary.
In keeping with the theme of AI deployment, TM Forum's AI agent, AIVA, drew on dozens of presentations and debates from the event to produce the summary. Meanwhile, Aaron Boasman-Patel, Vice President Innovation, TM Forum is the 'human in the loop' providing the curation and narration.

Peter Leukert, Chief Digital Officer at BT, discusses with TM Forum how an AI-native future depends of nurturing future skills and building strong foundations in data management, cybersecurity, testing and software engineering

Mark Sanders, Chief Architect, Tesltra, discusses with Guy Lupo, Executive Vice President, AI & Data Innovation, TM Forum, how the operator is addressing security, governance and trust as it builds the next phase of network autonomy on a foundation of a composable architecture
Sanders and Lupo explore Telstra's vision of a knowledge plane, which transforms data into structured, machine-readable intelligence that enables autonomous network systems to make trusted decisions.
Alongside this, they address the concept of model-as-a-service and why it is emerging as a critical capability, helping telcos harness rapidly evolving AI models without being overwhelmed by complexity, cost or risk.
The also focus on the importance of trust as telcos evolve their architectures, operations and use of AI to create autonomus operations that deliver new customer experiences.