Podcast

Ep 114 – What's up with Totogi: The ontology of BSS Magic

This week’s guest

Telco in 20 Featured Guest Marc Breslow Totogi View Linkedin profile

Marc Breslow

Field CTO Totogi

In today’s telco landscape, operators are struggling with legacy BSS systems that are highly customized, expensive, and impossible to change. Rather than continuing the traditional approach of swapping out systems (ouch) or simply adding AI to siloed applications, a more revolutionary solution is emerging—one that creates a digital twin of your entire telco business and applies AI across all systems simultaneously.

For this episode, I talk with Marc Breslow, Field CTO at Totogi. We’re exploring how Totogi’s BSS Magic is helping telcos leverage AI without replacing their existing systems while delivering dramatic results in weeks, instead of months. Listen now to hear:

  • How BSS Magic functions as a telco-specific ontological layer, not a replacement BSS system [04:12];
  • Why siloed AI approaches fail when trying to solve problems that span multiple systems [05:00];
  • How an Asian telco dramatically reduced their enterprise sales process time with BSS Magic [09:07];
  • How the BSS Magic transforms notoriously difficult BSS migrations from a multi-year project to just a few months [12:40].

Links and resources

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Guest bio

Marc Breslow is Field CTO of Totogi, where he is leveraging AI to revolutionize the telecommunications industry. A veteran of Accenture, Lehman Brothers, and Citibank, Marc has a proven track record of building scalable, high-performance systems. At Totogi, he leads the development of AI-powered solutions that drive tangible results for telcos: reducing churn, increasing ARPU, and streamlining business processes. Marc is responsible for customer proof points demonstrating these capabilities. When not engaging with customers, Marc leads teams building Totogi’s BSS Magic technology, generating applications and improving efficiency using AI agents and workflows.

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Podcast credits

  • Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR
  • Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
  • Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing
  • Audio Editor: Andrew Condell
  • Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery
  • Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio
  • Music: Dyami Wilson

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is BSS Magic and how does it differ from traditional BSS systems?

BSS Magic is a platform that enables telcos to leverage AI on top of their existing BSS systems without requiring replacements or massive overhauls. Unlike traditional BSS systems, it’s not a replacement—it’s a telco-specific ontological layer that creates a digital twin of your entire business. BSS Magic works across hundreds of existing systems simultaneously, allowing you to launch new applications, automate tasks with intelligent agents, and create helpful chatbots while leveraging what you already have in place.

2. Why doesn’t siloed AI work for enterprise telco operations?

Siloed AI fails because it lacks the context needed for most telco work, which spans multiple systems. When AI is added to just one vendor system, it can’t access information from other parts of the BSS estate. Most telco tasks require working across systems—like creating a plan in charging, then sharing it with legal for review, or routing it through approval workflows. BSS Magic provides AI that works the way people work: across all systems with full context. Learn more about identifying genuine AI solutions in How to suss out the fake agents at MWC25.

3. How did BSS Magic help an Asian telco improve its enterprise sales process?

An Asian telco challenged Totogi to reduce the time its enterprise sales team spent navigating CloudSense screens—a process that originally required 18-25 clicks and over five minutes. BSS Magic cut the time on task by more than 50%, reducing it to just two minutes. The customer was initially skeptical but became extremely enthusiastic after seeing the results, asking for a constant stream of AI agents to automate additional processes across its operations. See the Enterprise Sales Agent Flow demo in action.

4. How does BSS Magic accelerate migrations from legacy billing systems?

BSS Magic uses AI to slash data mapping time by automatically matching concepts between the legacy system, Totogi’s telco ontology, and the target system. Once both systems map to this common ontology, BSS Magic automates the creation of migration tools that extract, transform, cleanse, and load data into the new system. This approach compresses notoriously difficult migrations from legacy systems like Amdocs, Ericsson, or Huawei—typically 14-month projects—into easy four-month implementations. Read more about this transformation in The AI-first telco won’t wait 5 years for Amdocs.

5. What makes Totogi’s ontology approach different from building custom AI solutions?

While telcos could theoretically build their own AI solutions, they’d have to start from scratch with model picking, optimization, and training. Totogi’s BSS Magic comes with a telco-specific ontology rooted in industry standards like TM Forum that already represents concepts applicable to 90% of telcos—subscribers, products, devices, services, and revenue relationships. This allows telcos to immediately start building and modeling rather than spending years developing foundational infrastructure. Build your first AI Agent for free to see how quickly you can get started.

6. How is Danielle Rios and the Totogi team demonstrating BSS Magic’s capabilities?

DR and Marc Breslow’s Field CTO team are building in public, releasing new video demos weekly on Totogi’s YouTube channel, including the Inventory AI Agent, Competitive Product Design, and many more on the BSS Magic Demos playlist. These demos showcase real AI patterns, new models, and practical automation examples rather than just sales pitches. The approach has generated phenomenal response, with customers providing immediate feedback through DMs with questions, suggestions, and challenges that help shape future development priorities. Learn more about Building an AI-first Telco from DR’s Gen AI Summit talk at MWC25.