Cristianini, thank you very much. We are following your speech, I must say, there is a lot to study. I was hoping that artificial intelligence would protect us from in-depth analysis. Actually, thanks to you, the professor reminded us that we must do human things, which also means making decisions, making choices at these crossroads, and so soon we will also talk about crossroads in our normality, in our pockets. But first, let me also thank the sponsors from the educational world, Jul, Telematic University with whom an hackathon on Education 5.0 was organized at the House of Emerging Technologies, and Little Genius International, part of the same Hackathon, and also Istituto Panteon Design and Technology, all towards this crossing, this change, these mutations that are underway, and yet all these things go on networks, both physical and digital, also via satellite, also via Pontedera, in short, they move and then end up in our pockets. Let's give a big round of applause to the CEO of TIM, Pietro Labriola.
Hello. Please. So, I'll leave you the microphone. Oh, as you wish. That one is green too. Better green than yellow. I mean, yellow is my color. Did you want red?
Tired. It's Friday. Intercontinental travels, but I'm happy to be here. I also heard what the professor was saying, so I'm here at your disposal. I'm not able to teach anything, I warn you. I'll only tell you what we do, our experience from a different point of view, but precisely to reconnect with Nello Cristianini, we are at this crossroads, right, of choices that consumers make, human beings who make companies, and when you think, I don't know, artificial intelligence always seems like a very distant world, right, between companies and consumers. But you made a choice, you crossed this crossroads by also choosing to insert Perplexity into the daily life of consumers with TIM. Tell us about this agreement, why you made this choice.
Certainly, if you allow me, seeing an audience made up of both young and not-so-young like me, perhaps it's better to frame it in terms of the evolution of the way people work and manage know-how. Let's start with the first point. My generation was used to a concept where rote learning, which had a negative connotation, learning everything by heart, was a survival necessity. Those of us who were luckier had a family that could afford an encyclopedia. At school they told you to learn everything by heart because if you needed information, it wasn't accessible to everyone anyway. And this is also reflected for younger people when they go to work in large companies like TIM, in a context where you find your older colleagues who tend not to share things with you because know-how is power. The more know-how I have, the more power I have. Then there was a second phase, the arrival of the internet, where know-how is data, it's no longer power, it's accessible to everyone, always, at zero cost. What became more important as an element, I see it with my daughter, 19 years old, she went to an international school where the element they tried to teach her was to understand the quality of information and to synthesize. And this has also put the way of working in companies in crisis, because if you try to tell a colleague of my age 'make me a summary', it's complex. Beyond what the professor was explaining about the evolution of AI, but today there is a tool that skips both steps, it has the information and makes the summary. So we must start thinking, reasoning about how this will change the world around us, the way of working in companies, the human relationship between people and the educational system, because our educational system is not adequate to follow this path. That said, what do we do? The agreement we made with Perplexity and that we will replicate with other players in the AI world responds first of all, in the most basic and least romantic component, to our marketing strategy of customer platform.
Excuse me, how many know Perplexity? Okay, sorry, a little survey, it's not that I didn't trust you, eh, but
What does Castel Platon mean? Why
He was just talking rightly about telecommunications technology as an enabling element. Telecom operators in the consumer segment actually have difficulty moving forward because connectivity has become a commodity, even though it is an essential service. Many of you may be with Iliad, with Kena, but also with TIM. They pay €7-8 per month for telephony, but if I take it away for a second line, you are all dead. But for you there is this anomalous situation: 'You want to pay little, but you cannot live without it.' Reversing this paradigm will be complex. So, what is the future of telecom operators? Being a customer platform. You have a customer base, I have 30 million customers, I am very strong, so for example in the case of Perplexity, as famous as Perplexity is, it is not as famous as TIM, so if they want to grow quickly they prefer to align themselves with a strong brand, almost playing off it, using a second stronger brand to accelerate their growth. But they don't have a customer base. We have a customer base, so I can sell services to all my customers. It's not the case of Perplexity, but we have the ability to bill all customers every month. The younger ones, and there are no Americans here, might say 'But why? Why do I have to pay on the bill? There are credit cards.' Well, Netflix and Disney have partnerships with us because, believe it or not, we have a large portion of customers who don't want to pay Netflix and Disney with a credit card, they want to pay it on our bill. But the absurdity, and it's the issue of trust, is that they pay us with direct debit, which is practically the same thing as a credit card.
and on top of that they pay for it.
And on top of that they pay for it. And then we have two other elements, a commercial channel because in the wonderful world of digital, the physical still has relevance. I remember like a case study that should be taught in business schools, the launch of the Google Phone, I think 10 years ago, the kings of digital crashed because they thought they could sell a phone purely online. Yet there are all the elements, e-commerce tools, logistics, but people today, unless it's a repeat purchase, sometimes want to go see, touch, understand. These elements, therefore, allow us to say 'I can't develop business in terms of revenue growth from selling connectivity, because you don't want to pay even €1 more, and €1 is less than a coffee, but from us you would be willing to buy Netflix, Disney, Perplexity and all the other services. Top of that, watch the movie Social Dilemma. If there weren't a regulatory problem, today we telecom operators are the biggest potential competitor of Google, Facebook, Instagram, because we have more information than them
and more historical data. There's a difference. We are regulated in the real and physical world, and they are in a jurisdiction that is the digital jurisdiction, which to date it's not clear if it has rules and physical places.
You say, and let's say if I have a problem with Netflix or Meta, I don't have a call center active 24/7.
I'll tell you more, but which privacy regulation do you apply? And of course
the digital world and we are too slow, and then I'll come back to you.
You come back because we have little time. I think we should meet again for an hour, an hour and a half. But I leave you with this reasoning. We are used to reality, geographical borders, physical assets and the rules that apply. The digital world is not this, and all governments struggle to regulate these things. Google, not Google. Many hyperscalers sell services in Italy, have their tax headquarters in Ireland and apply Delaware privacy. We are at the arbitrage of rules.
