Pietro Labriola - Italian Tech Week 2025

Thank you, Fabitio. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss something that is a reality, is no more a fiction. This move is answering to two different approaches. The first one is the future of the telco player that are becoming a customer platform will be a commercial platform that will allow anyone to sell to our customer different services. But today we are not here to say that we are good to do that. The second element is that we have to bring to the customer the new technology. Whatever is new sometimes scares people, and if you have to pay, you will not take the risk. Each of us today, every time that we have to buy something new, we think about that because we're used to fraud. We don't know if what is promised is right. I never see any kind of advertising say that what we are going to sell is not the reality. Of course not. So the idea was: we have a company where the employees are 53 years old on average, and trying to tell our employees to use AI was difficult. The same is also for our customer. So the idea was: why don't we allow them to use this technology at zero risk? They don't have to pay. They have to get used to it, experiment, and then try to understand how it will fit with their needs. Because the truth is that AI is not a specific thing that helps you in something. The boundaries are your fantasy, the way in which you want to do things.

Yeah. And to give you an idea, also a large corporate as us, one week ago had to do a board of directors of TIM, a listed company, and we have to discuss about an important item. Usually, one of the issues is that all the board members not necessarily know all the technical details. You have to put at their disposal a presentation five days before the board. But they are not technicians. They not necessarily know what you are going to tell. With two people in my company that are not necessarily people of the technical department, but just people that are crazy for AI on their own, what we did: we bring the presentation in PowerPoint, we get to the AI the profile of the board member, their degree, what they like or what they don't like. We get all the information that we give to the market in the last three years, my speech, all these kinds of things. We put all together and we ask to create a podcast with questions and answers that was trying to explain why we were doing that kind of activity or deal. And my board member became crazy because they told me, 'You did something that is incredible. But you didn't need several engineers, just three people curious of innovation and that like to understand and try new things.'

One of the main issues is again you have a digital divide related to the age. Below 20 years old, the issue is how to stop the use of AI. I have a daughter that is 19 years old, and so she was due to do the homework with AI, and due to the fact that the school was using AI to understand if my daughter was using AI, she was studying how to work on that. So this is a segment of the market where you don't have to work for the inclusion. The issue is for elder people. If we don't work with some activity like the one that I did as TIM, giving to everybody AI to test it, it will be difficult because sometimes the risk is that you are creating a difference, again a digital divide that this time is not related to the infrastructure but to the know-how and the confidence about the technology. And the main issue is that in our experience, in the fast technology to overcome your behavior and your life was taking years. But if you look at how things are changing in the real world, they are much faster than in the past. You move from radio to TV after several years, to black and white TV to color TV in several years. Then you started to see WhatsApp. It was very fast. Then it comes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and every time faster and faster. So AI will not give you the time to wait and see, because it's like a wave. If you wait, the wave will overcome you. If you want to have fun and survive, you have to search the wave.

I, what I'm experiencing, that sometimes there's a matter of the culture. It's not so nice to say, but you have to face the reality that large corporate are very hierarchical.

If the chief executive officer does not show what it means, it's very difficult that bottom-up, I repeat in so large corporation, will happen something. So I started to approach AI. I started to discuss with my first line how I was using AI. Just to give you an example: we have some solution that we gave to our customer to answer to the issue, and they told to my team it doesn't work well because if I get ChatGPT and they ask the same question, it's much more efficient than the one that we have. When someone was coming to me and was saying 'We have to do that in this way,' I was asking why, and I was using in front of them AI to challenge them. Now I see that all my team, every time that we discuss something, Pietro stops and they go on ChatGPT or on Perplexity to look to these things. And the average outcome now is that we are becoming much faster in the decision making process, because this is the reality. Then it's clear that countries like Italy, France, Germany, and Spain have to face also some challenges. Why in our countries the job is very important. And they continue to share this kind of view. And today the business case of AI out of these countries are related to firing people. We have to build an Italian, French, German, Spanish way to use AI. But having in mind that our culture is important to save the work and the job of our people. This is the main challenge that we have to do. Then if you are curious, you can do a lot of things. Just to give you an idea: when I have to do every quarter a call to the financial market to explain the result of the company.