Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. Hello, listeners. Welcome back. 0:13 We are coming to you live from CES 2020 in Las Vegas, and I am sitting here with Mike Zito from AT&T. 0:21 And Mike, you are the vice president, I guess I'm looking at this, of Advanced Solutions, Internet of Things, AT&T Business. Yep. Keeping so mu- so busy these days. Yeah, lots going on, but it's all good stuff. 0:32 Thanks for having us on the show. Appreciate it. Oh, I'm loving having you guys. I was talking to Mo earlier, and now you. I'm like, it is all about 5G, and there's so much smart city stuff to talk about, so. 0:43 Mo's a tough act to follow, by the way. He is. So, you know, it's just gonna be... This will be a tough one. 0:47 Oh, you're gonna do great because, you know, you and I have talked many times before, but what I'm really excited about is just to get into what's happening with smart cities and all the exciting things that are happening. 0:56 Here at CES, it's loud and crazy. It's always loud and crazy every year, but I'm really excited to see what you've been doing here in Las Vegas. 1:05 You guys have had some exciting things happen here in Las Vegas specifically. Yeah, we have. 1:10 And you know, it's interesting because now, you know, smart cities was pretty siloed, uh, when we first started the business four years ago, and we had this vision to really take a holistic approach to how to enable a city to become more efficient, to become safer, to become more livable, and to become more inclusive for people, right? 1:26 So over the journey since we founded the business four years ago, we've really made a lot of progress. 1:31 And, and Las Vegas has been one of those cities where I think it, it shows just the, um, you know, the expansion of our strategy, and we've got 5G deployed here in Las Vegas. 1:42 We've got, uh, intelligent LED lighting deployed here in Las Vegas. We've got public Wi-Fi deployed here. And really what we've done is we've worked with the city, uh, a- as well with FirstNet. 1:52 Um, you know, we, we've got a, a platform developed that now can continuously be built on to add value for the city of Las Vegas, but we're also doing that across other cities. 2:02 So it's pretty amazing, you know, to look at the evolution of where we started and where we've come from, and 5G is a big enabler of that, so it's pretty amazing. 2:10 Help me understand because when I hear you talk right now, I hear a lot of advantages of just smart G technology, but I also hear you talk about it takes partners. Sure. It takes... 2:23 It, you know, it, you know, people wanna say, no pun intended, it takes a village. Yeah. Sure. You know? It takes a city. Yeah. 2:29 But it takes a lot of people to work together to make it work because you've got a lot of masters you're serving, citizens and businesses, and people get grumpy if things don't work- [laughs]... 2:39 and if they don't work well, right? Sure. Well, I would never say that, but, um- [laughs] I can say that for you. Yeah, definitely. But it does take a village, and there's no one company that does it all. 2:47 It's really a true ecosystem approach. 2:50 Um, and, and you also have to approach it not just from the city's perspective but from the region's perspective because, you know, you look at a city like Atlanta, really Atlanta's about the Metro Atlanta region, not just the city of Atlanta. 3:00 So you're s- you're looking at ways to work with the city or cities, work with the economic development authority, work with the utilities in the regions, right? 3:09 And AT&T's always a big employer and a big participant in all of those communities where our people live, work, and play, um, and our employees are. 3:17 So, you know, it's really important for us to be able to serve the businesses, to your point, um, the consumer customers, the cities, uh, the schools, right? And, and really have a holistic approach to that also. 3:28 Uh, and, and again, we can't do everything on our own, so it's really important that we bring this, this really robust group of, of, of partners to the table, uh, and, and of alliance members to the table that really wanna go out and have the same value and provide the same benefit for citizens. 3:46 And we've got a... We're very uniquely positioned as AT&T to do that. 3:50 We've been doing it for 140 years, and, you know, we're still in those cities working with, with alliance members and partners today to help bring that value. 4:00 You said something very important that I love that you said, live, work, and play. We take that for granted because when something doesn't work, and that's when I said we get grumpy, that's when it's most noticeable. 4:11 When, when it works, everybody's happy. Yeah. So it's that seamless integration of things, you know? Streetlights work. Streetlights don't work, there's an accident. 4:21 You know, when things aren't humming in, in a town or a community and our families, and, and you know, when you talked about FirstNet, we wanna know that our, our first responders are there when we need them. 4:31 That's why the integration of partners is so very important, and we want to know- Agreed... that that communication works when we need it. Yeah. Yeah. No, agreed 100%. I mean, the infrastructure is, you know... 4:41 A- and if you think about the connectivity piece of it, and let's call it connectivity broadly because it's not just about 5G in cities, right? 4:48 I mean, 5G's the rage, and, and there's a lot of investment being, being placed into 5G, but this is really about, you know, a fabric of connectivity types. 4:57 And based on the use case or what problem you're trying to solve, you will turn to a different connectivity technology, if you will. It might be 5G for really low latency or for video type of applications. 5:08 It might be, uh, low power, NB-IoT or LTE-M, that's gonna enable, uh, a smart grid system or water meters or parking meters. Uh, it could be Wi-Fi. It could be fiber. 5:20 So it really is a fabric of connectivity that you wanna make sure is reliable. You wanna make sure that it's, there's, there's low latency, um, that it's, that it's up, and that it's secure, right? 5:30 And again, you know, I... 5:32 being in this business now, uh, with AT&T and, and looking at our history, those are the things that we, that we really put at front and center.Security is such a big part of that because when we say that, you know, it's kind of funny, we talk about even garbage pickup. 5:46 You know, we don't wanna know that our garbage gets hacked- Right, right. Yeah... right? That somebody else... 'Cause then you have garbage all over the street, right? We think that's... 5:53 It sounds funny, but those little things, or traffic accidents, at the time sounds humorous, but it wouldn't be humorous if something happened, right? Yeah. 6:02 Cyber i- is, is obviously a major, uh, area of opportunity for cities to focus, right? And the challenge with cities especially is they don't have a lot of resources, right? 6:11 I mean, we're all taxpayers, um, and, and the people that work in cities on our behalf, uh, a- and are in public service, they're working really hard. They're doing the jobs of a couple of people, right? 6:21 And so, you know, from a cyber perspective, we've been trying to help the cities really look at their cybersecurity strategy. 6:27 We've made investments in companies, um, and brought them into AT&T so that we had offerings to take out to the market. 6:33 That's a really big part of our business, and it's really important because if you, if you go back to your example of, uh, a, a traffic, uh, an intelligent traffic system, right, that's out there with automated lights, you don't want that to get hacked, right? 6:46 Uh, and so it's really important that you've got the right cyber strategy in place, and we're helping companies, and we're helping cities do that, uh, across the US. 6:54 How has all of the smart city communities h- that you've been helping, you know, we talked about what you're doing, you've done in Atlanta, we're talking about in Las Vegas, things like that, how has it evolved from what it's been the last decade to, you know, maybe in the last five or 10 years to where we are, to what we think is going to happen? 7:14 I mean, we're, we're talking about 5G right now and, and the evolution of it. When we talk about the Internet of Things- Yeah... 7:19 when we talk about connecting all these things, that's a big leap forward to what we've all expected from 2G, 3G, 4G, the things that you just described, to 5G and LTE and all the things that we're all seeing. Yeah. 7:33 So it's interesting. You know, we're actually, from an IoT perspective, we're putting a device on the network every two seconds. That's crazy. A cellular connected device. 7:41 We've got over 400 million devices that are being powered, um, by our wireless network and, uh, you know, it, it's pretty amazing when you look at the, the pace and scale at which this is picking up. 7:53 So, you know, IoT is a very pervasive technology. Really anything but a, a laptop or a cellphone is considered IoT now, right? So very broad. Um, you know, and it's, uh, it's, it's changing the game, right? 8:06 It's a, it's a life-changing thing, and what, what I, what we've seen over the last four years is we've seen an evolution from, you know, cities buying in silos and looking at solving problems in the silo, in the water department, in DPW around lighting, uh, something around waste collection, right, traffic management, public safety. 8:27 And we've seen cities taking a more now holistic approach and really trying to create a strategy that's all-encompassing and pulling everybody within the city departments together to solve common problems and challenges, right? 8:41 Um, and, and that's what we really start to see the last four years. 8:44 I think last year we started to see a shift towards getting citizens involved more in the decision making, which I think is really important, um, uh, because in a lot of cases you're solving the problems for them, their tax dollars are going to actually pay for the solutions that they'd like to receive a t- return on that, that impact their lives in a positive way. 9:03 And in some cases too, you know, you've got the privacy aspect to the data, so you wanna make sure that you're getting them engaged in the conversation as you're developing the strategy, not developing the strategy, trying to roll it out, and then getting them involved in the conversation. 9:16 So it's been a, it's been a paradigm shift that way, and I think that's a really good thing for the United States and frankly for smart cities globally. 9:23 Are we talking a lot more of that, like when we talk about smart meters, utilities, things in that area, getting citizens more engaged in that area as well? Yeah. 9:31 So I, the utilities, uh, interestingly will do focus groups and whatnot, um, you know, depending on the type of solution that they're rolling out. 9:39 But they're primarily working with, you know, the utility commissions, the public utility commissions to get approval to go out and then do the projects. That's primarily where they're working. 9:47 And the interesting thing is all of those, all of those solutions that they want to raise capital for to go and deploy that are smart cities related, they've gotta have public benefit for them to be able to go out and get that capital, right? 10:00 And that's why the utility commission is there to make sure that the investments that are being made will benefit the public and the entire rate base in some capacity, not just one section of the rate base. 10:10 So, you know, you are starting to see more interaction, I think from the cities with the citizens, and then the utilities are working more with the utility commissions. We're working with Exelon. 10:18 We've worked with Georgia Power, National Grid. You know, the utilities are a really big, important part of this in, in getting scale, right? 10:26 So that's, that's where we're working with the utilities and we're seeing traction, is really around the scale aspect of it. 10:32 Are we starting to see a lot more because every, all these bigger companies, as, as you are as well as AT&T, have to think so much about sustainability? 10:40 You know, companies and with cities now are constantly thinking about this, you know, 'cause citizens are constantly thinking about it. 10:48 You know, we, we have to think about more sustainable environment, our cities, how are we doing things better, faster, quicker, easier. Yeah. It, it's interesting. 10:56 You know, sustainability a- and, and CSR, um, you know, corporate sustainability, you know, at AT&T has been an extremely important part of what we as employees and what our leadership teams do every day. 11:08 We think about that, and how do we be good corporate citizens, how do we be good stewards of the environment while we're providing services to customers. But at the same time, you know, how can we conserve resources? 11:19 How do we use our own technology that we would take to a customer and use that internally to decrease water loss, right, and monitor consumption? 11:27 We've saved, you know, millions of gallons of, of water from being lost because we're using IoT monitoring techniques and solutions that we would take to a customer. Uh, reducing our carbon footprint. 11:37 We've got a 10X initiative internally. Uh, and, and how do we create a more efficient fleet, um, and decrease our carbon footprint? So it's things like that that I think every company has a responsibility to look at. 11:49 We do a great job of it. 11:50 Uh, we have a, a, a stellar team internally, um, and frankly one of, I think, you know, Charlene Lake and her team, they're, they're the leaders, uh, when it comes to really looking holistically across the entire business and how we can drive internal sustainability initiatives. 12:03 And then my job is to, is to work with our team and say, "How do we take these key learnings, take them out to other businesses in these communities that we're trying to create smart cities in?" 12:12 Because, you know, you can't really have a smart city without smart buildings.Yeah, you can't Right? You can't do it, right? You can't have a smart city without monitoring, uh, vehicles, right? 12:23 Not only for safety, but for emissions, right? So, you know, it's things like that where you really wanna create a livable, sustainable environment for citizens, you've gotta take all that into account. 12:32 So how do you go out and explain to a city why a smart city infrastructure is so important? 12:40 Yeah so, you know, when you're, when you're talking to a city, again, every city has similar problems, but they have different problems, right? 12:46 Some are neighborhood by neighborhood, uh, but, you know, some of the, some of the challenges that they're dealing with and, you know, we at AT&T like to call them opportunities, right? 12:54 Um, some of the opportunities that, that we can help cities, uh, address, um, a- and, and create, uh, better, better situations for their citizens and for the businesses that they serve, you know, they're... 13:06 The broad ones would be public safety. The broad ones would be, uh, reducing, uh, traffic, reducing, uh, traffic-related incidents, pedestrian-related incidents. 13:16 Um, and then sometimes you get, you know, neighborhood-by-neighborhood challenges that you've gotta deal with. But, you know, it's interesting. One of the things we talk to cities about is not just the... 13:25 You know, we're, we're calling it infrastructure today, but it's really we're trying to provide them with a framework where they can develop out a platform that scales with infrastructure as part of it, right? 13:35 Um, and so there's a lot of goodness that can ride on top of it, and one of the areas where we're, we're spending a lot of time is, you know, there's a billion people across the world that are disabled living in cities. 13:45 So it's how do you create environments for not only people that are, that are, that are mobile, but how do you create environments, uh, smart environments, right, safe environments for citizens that have disabilities, whether that be hearing impaired, uh, vision impaired, or, you know, have mobility issues. 14:04 So, you know, it, it's really spending a lot of time with the cities to understand, hey, here's some common problems, but then what are the, what are the other issues that you're dealing with on a, on a daily basis that every city might not be, right? 14:16 When you look at these, and, and we talked about it earlier, about the right partners, does each city have different partners that are more effective than other cities? 14:26 I know that sounds kind of like an awkward question, but I would guess that that has to play a role based on what you just said, based on this might be an elderly com- more of an elderly community, let's say, when you have more retiring folks, let's say, in Florida or here in Vegas- Sure... 14:42 versus a younger community, let's say, in, in New York or some other where that might be. Do you have to take those kind of things into consideration? So I think you take the use cases into consideration, right? Okay. 14:52 So if you think about, um, you know, the baby boomer population, right? I mean, my parents are 71. They live in Naples, Florida. I live in Atlanta, Georgia. 15:00 An aging in place type of solution that could be provided to them so that I could have peace of mind that they're safe in their home and know that there's proper notifications to first responders, would there be a challenge? 15:13 I, I mean, that's worth its weight in gold to me, right? 15:16 Um, and so I think there are, uh, there are use cases for certain population sets within cities that are different, um, or, or would be prioritized more based on the point in that person's life, right? 15:28 Or that demographic's life. 15:30 But, um, you know, there's, uh, there's, uh, again, some common themes across all of those, and then you're gonna pick your partners, if you will, your, your solution providers, you know, with AT&T as the master systems integrator within the framework, if you will, based on what use cases you're trying to solve for, right? 15:47 So and some of them do have, um, some of them do have, uh, very strong relationships with some of these cities because they've been working with them for years as well. 15:56 So in some cases, you know, the cities might say, "Hey, we're gonna run a procurement process," um, and, you know, there's a group of folks that have been working in the city for a long time that have survived that procurement process and are awarded the business, and that's a good thing. 16:10 So is there a first step a smart city should take to wanna engage with AT&T? 16:16 Yeah so, you know, I think, I think any, uh, city, any group of city leaders, uh, whether it be council members, whether it be, uh, you know, the actual city manager and his team or whether it be a, a strong mayor city, you know, I mean, it's easy enough to reach out to myself or, or one of the team. 16:34 Um, you know, and, and what we've said over the last couple years and we've seen happen is city leadership reach out much earlier in the process, right? 16:42 To help to start to develop the strategy, and it's not as much that you're developing the strategy for them. 16:48 You're basically helping them understand what you've learned across working with other cities, uh, over the last four years or 140 years if you wanna look at it that way, right? 16:59 And really help them understand here are some of the challenges or opportunities that you could actually, uh, not have to work through based on some of the experience that we've had working in cities that started a little earlier. 17:12 Do you think that some of the smart cities or cities out there should learn from other cities? I mean, that's where that networking comes in because why should they make the same mistakes another city? 17:24 Because if they learn from each other, they can say, "Look, you don't wanna make this mistake 'cause it's a costly endeavor and you don't have the resources as being a city 'cause tax dollars aren't as deep as being a private entity," right? 17:37 I mean, isn't there some benefits? We're, we're starting to see that. Yeah, the cities are de- there's definitely a benefit, and the cities, they do... The CIOs, uh, tend to talk to each other often. 17:45 Now, you know, again, four years after we stood the business up, you have directors of smart city strategy and programs that are in place that are talking to each other. 17:54 There's more events out there that allow them to come together and collaborate. A company like AT&T, uh, you know, I, I talked about inclusion before. 18:01 You know, we actually, uh, have developed a inclusive innovation playbook that you can give to cities and help them understand how to leverage IoT technologies and smart cities technology to actually be more inclusive, right? 18:13 Uh, and so, you know, private industry's helping with that as well. So I think it's a good thing. It's all moving in the right direction. There's more collaboration. There's more communication. 18:21 And, you know, it, it's really important that that all happens because that's how we're gonna scale this across the US and, frankly, across the world and really be able to provide those benefits to people. 18:28 They have to get past, and I would imagine a lot of city managers are worried that, you know, uh, am I being sold something, you know? Sure. Is it gonna hurt? 18:36 You know, is, is this going to be something that I can scale up?Future Yeah You know, other products come in and because technology changes. It does. It does. 18:45 I mean, we've all seen exponentially we think, you know, some of us remember VHS beta, you know? [laughs] I remember that. You know? Okay, I mean- I had a cassette recorder too by the way. Oh. I remember that too. 18:55 There you go. See? Yeah. And we know what happens and it's gone, or Blu-ray, whatever. Yeah. Now we're streaming and all these things happen, so people start saying, "What happened?" 19:01 And I'm sure as a city manager or someone else who's involved, the CTO, CIO's involved in that, gets nervous and says, "Look, I don't wanna be the one that made the, the idea of this is going to be the, our, our street lighting system or whatever we're gonna do- Right. 19:17 And then it's obsolete in a couple years... and it's obsolete." Yeah. "And we can't connect it to..." 'Cause it, the process takes... It's, it's long to get approval. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's a great point, right? 19:25 And, and you know, it's interesting because when you actually look at building out a strategy, you've got to build out a strategy that's sustainable in itself, right? And that has a 10-year life or a 20-year view, right? 19:37 And there might be a technology refresh or two technology refreshes in that strategy, and that's okay. That's normal, right? 19:45 Uh, and utilities I think do a good job of leading that charge because they look at everything from a very long-term view. 19:50 It's a 10-year or 20-year play, and then they have a really good model that they can build in that technology refresh, take into account new things coming down the line. 19:59 And even you look at the communication changes from 4G to 5G, right? And all the low power solutions that are out there with LTE and MB IoT that we offer, right? 20:07 There's a lot of options now that weren't there, you know, three years ago, four years ago, when they were putting some technology strategy in place to become smarter and more efficient. 20:16 So that mindset's kind of interesting because that's different. Manufacturers struggle with that, making that long-term play versus the smart city. 20:25 So is that something that that mindset that you get a smart city to think of because utilities get it, has to somewhat get carried over to smart cities to make that then get carried over to manufacturing and we see that adoption to IoT, all this connected technology will start getting more- Yeah, so-... 20:42 adoption more rapidly? You, you know what's really interesting? We're, we're working... 20:45 One of the areas, uh, I have for the business that I'm privileged enough to lead is our go-to-market for our 5G and MEC center of excellence for the business and the enterprise sector, right? 20:55 So Mo probably talked about it was, when he was here, you know, but when we created 5G, right, our 5G strategy was really about enterprise first, you know, and, and have the opportunity to bring that to manufacturing facilities so that they can create a private network or a cellular network in their facility and still have the same benefit of that lower latency of keeping data private using MEC. 21:16 So we, we are helping enterprises adopt that as well. And then from a city's perspective, uh, you know, I think it's, it's just a different conversation that you have to have. There's different sensitivities, right? 21:26 Um, cities have shareholders in their own right. They're s- called citizens, and they're called businesses that pay taxes, you know? 21:32 But if you say to a citizen, um, or, or you say to city council, if you deploy this, uh, this, this smart city technology to, uh, to hear unreported gunshots, uh, and, and you can correlate that back to an increase in tax dollars because property values stay higher in a community because you can prove that you've reduced incidents and it's safer using that technology, they have no problem, uh, paying for that from a tax-based perspective. 22:02 So looking at this right now, what excites you most right now? You know, 5G is gonna be absolutely transformational, right? And, and, and it's exciting when, when you have the opportunity to decrease latency to... 22:15 You know, 5G's really important for IoT because you'll go from being able to create, you know, connect, uh, you know, thousands of things per square kilometer to millions, right? 22:24 And, and you've got this massive IoT connection opportunity, so more things are gonna get connected. There's gonna be more efficiency. There's gonna be more sustainability opportunities. 22:33 We're gonna be able to bring down the latency in the network by putting, uh, the, the processing closer with, with NEC, network edge compute, and with MEC, multi-edge access compute. 22:41 And, and it's just gonna create a whole set of use cases through innovating on top of 5G that is just gonna absolutely change the game. It's gonna change people's lives for the better. 22:50 It's gonna change businesses and the way that they're operated for the better, and it's gonna provide a lot of value for citizens and for shareholders, you know, of those companies or of those cities. 22:59 It's gonna be, it's gonna be amazing. 23:00 I mean, it gets me fired up to think that we're at this convergence of IoT and 5G and MEC all coming together, and we have the opportunity to sit in the middle of it and really help to drive what the world is gonna look like over the next three, five, 10 years. 23:14 It's amazing. These are exciting times, right? They are. They are. You're sitting at the middle of it too. I love it. You get to talk to a lot of great people. I do. Mike Zito- Thank you. Thank you very much... 23:22 from AT&T Bus- Business. Thank you so much. All right. All right. Mike, where can our listeners go, though? Where can you... What... Where can they go to learn more about AT&T? What's the URL? You got one for us? Yes. 23:31 You can, you can hit us at at&t.com, um, and then you can always hit me on Twitter at, @mzito, right? And, and we'll, we'll make it happen. All right. We'll get you in touch with the right people. That is perfect. 23:40 All right, well we are out of time for today. We will be back here from CES 2020 at 11:00 to 1:00 Pacific Time or 1:00 to 3:00 Central Time, if I get that right. 23:51 So but you can also tweet at us at Twitter, @connectedwmag. All right. This is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. 24:01 And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. See you tomorrow.
