Santiago Tenorio

Chief Technology Officer & Senior Vice President of Strategy and Technology Enablement, Verizon

Search every verified Santiago Tenorio interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Santiago Tenorio, Verizon's Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Strategy and Technology Enablement, has recently discussed the company's efforts toward autonomous networks and AI integration. In a July 2026 podcast appearance, he described Verizon's work toward "Level 4 network autonomy," where AI agents operate as "digital colleagues" under human supervision, potentially reducing incident resolution times from hours to seconds. He emphasized that such agents should be managed like employees, with defined scopes, IDs, and guardrails. Tenorio also compared the progression of network autonomy to autonomous vehicles, noting that Level 4 would resemble a Waymo while Level 3 is closer to current Tesla capabilities. In late 2025, Tenorio spoke at several industry events about the future of telecommunications. At a Wireless Infrastructure Association policy event in October 2025, he predicted an "iPhone moment" driven by changes in how users interface with technology, citing wearable sensing devices that could provide continuous context to AI systems. He also advocated for additional spectrum allocation, stating that the recent 800 MHz pipeline was a positive step but that future 6G networks would require larger contiguous spectrum blocks. In a separate interview, Tenorio discussed Verizon's deployment of over 30,000 vRAN base stations with Samsung, describing it as the largest open RAN network, and outlined Verizon's 6G strategy of designing technology around specific use cases rather than delivering technology first. He also expressed skepticism about early open RAN expectations, noting that plug-and-play interoperability among many small vendors was never realistic.