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Allan Rasmussen, CEO of MVNO Services, discusses global MVNO licensing challenges, why Nigeria's market remains stalled, and opportunities on the horizon.
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Ep 125 – What’s up with Totogi: The power of vertical AI (Michael Walker)
This week’s guest
Michael Walker
Enterprise AI Deployment Strategy TotogiMIT research shows that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail, and the culprit is likely the daunting task of managing business context. When AI doesn’t understand the full picture of your business, it makes poor decisions and delivers disappointing results that leave operators questioning whether AI can deliver real value.
In this “What’s up with Totogi?” episode, I’m talking with Michael Walker, who leads enterprise AI deployment strategy at Totogi. He’s focused on what we believe is the right approach for telcos: vertical AI, built specifically for telcos, that understands the industry and your business from day one. We dive into why most telcos are experiencing “context chaos” with their AI deployments, how Totogi’s ontology approach eliminates the guesswork, and how our BSS Magic can turbocharge ancient legacy systems without expensive migrations, data aggregation, or swap offs.
Listen now to hear:
- How context engineering makes AI work at scale [05:00];
- How Totogi’s ontology framework manages context across thousands of AI agents without operational chaos [07:49];
- Why you don’t need data lake migrations to make BSS Magic work [10:24]; and
- A customer example of building a complex sales agent in just four weeks [13:09].
Links and resources
- Check out my blog, Context is EVERYTHING, to learn how context engineering can turn expensive demos into successful enterprise AI.
- Read MIT’s report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, on why 95% of enterprise AI projects fail.
- Learn about Totogi’s BSS Magic and its telco-specific ontology approach.
- Watch our conversation from MWC25, where Michael and I discuss how BSS Magic uses AWS Bedrock to bring AI intelligence to legacy telecom systems, solving vendor interoperability challenges that have held telcos back for decades.
- Check out how Totogi’s AI-powered BSS Magic reduced CloudSense’s TM Forum API certification from 26 months to four weeks.
- Watch my interview with TelecomTV, where I discuss how Tier-one operators are using BSS Magic to achieve dramatic results with BSS Magic AI, including 15% faster sales quoting and reducing support tickets from five hours to 15 minutes.
- Learn how multiple Tier 1 telecom operators are using Totogi’s BSS Magic to achieve 80% faster order processing and 75% cost reductions by deploying AI agents across existing legacy systems without costly replacements.
- Find out more about Totogi by meeting with us at TelecomTV’s AI-Native Telco Forum in Düsseldorf, Germany on October 23-24. DM me on LinkedIn or X @TelcoDR to set up a time to meet.
- Watch this Scandinavian mother explain why it’s “normal” to see babies nap outside in Sweden and the health benefits they believe it provides – leaving them outside in temperatures as low as −13 °F / −25 °C
- Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.
- You can find the episode transcript here.
Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value it can bring.
Guest bio
Michael Walker leads enterprise AI deployment strategy at Totogi. He has extensive experience deploying enterprise AI solutions across industries including telecommunications, enterprise technology, automotive, and oil and gas. At Totogi, Michael leads the company’s BSS Magic initiative, helping telecom operators adopt AI at scale by leveraging BSS Magic’s universal ontology layer to accelerate transformation and unlock new business value.
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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. Why do 95% of enterprise AI projects fail?
According to MIT research discussed in the episode, 95% of enterprise AI projects fail due to insufficient context. Without proper context, AI systems lack the full picture of a business and struggle to make accurate decisions. This “context chaos” occurs when AI acts on incomplete, outdated, or siloed data that doesn’t understand the meaning and relationships within business operations. To succeed, AI needs comprehensive context that includes what the system knows about your business, stored information from previous interactions, and access to relevant external data sources. Learn more about context engineering here in DR’s blog, Context is EVERYTHING.
2. What is Totogi’s ontology and why does it matter for telcos?
Totogi’s ontology is a systematic framework that manages business context for AI deployments at scale. It captures the “telco DNA”—the nouns and verbs of telecommunications business—providing AI with industry-specific knowledge from day one. The ontology eliminates the operational nightmare of managing thousands of AI agents across hundreds of systems by maintaining synchronized context across all deployments. When telcos need to update information, like adding a new VIP plan, the ontology ensures all agents and systems stay aligned without manual updates across each one.
3. What’s the difference between horizontal and vertical AI for telecommunications?
Horizontal AI offers broad applications across different industries and departments but lacks deep industry knowledge and context. Vertical AI, like Totogi’s approach, comes pre-loaded with telecommunications-specific terminology, processes, and industry knowledge from day one. Since telcos are 95-97% similar in their operations, vertical AI can speak the industry’s language fluently without requiring extensive customization. This means faster deployment and better results because the AI already understands networks, subscribers, provisioning, billing disputes, and customer churn challenges specific to telecommunications.
4. Does BSS Magic require moving data to a data lake or replacing existing systems?
No. Totogi uses “connected intelligence” to access data directly from existing systems in real-time without migrations, data syncing, or years-long data projects. BSS Magic connects to billing systems, CRM, OSS, and even notoriously closed systems like Amdocs without requiring replacements or data movement. The system reads data from source systems, translates it into Totogi’s common ontology schema, and enables AI to act on all accessible data. This approach means telcos can add AI capabilities while keeping everything that works in place—no massive migrations or moving data to centralized lakes.
5. How quickly can Totogi build custom AI agents using BSS Magic?
Totogi built a complex sales agent for a customer in four weeks—a timeline the customer initially said was impossible. The agent analyzed call recordings, created transcripts, recommended products, and performed pipeline health evaluations. This rapid development is possible because Totogi’s vertical AI approach includes telco-specific context and ontology built-in. Development focuses only on the AI layer and specific use case rather than building foundational context from scratch. Real implementations consistently demonstrate this speed advantage that surprises customers who’ve never seen enterprise AI deployed this quickly.
6. What can telcos actually do with Totogi’s BSS Magic and an ontology approach?
Telcos gain transformative capabilities including: instantly querying data across systems (like “show me top churn risk customers by ARPU”), migrating systems in weeks instead of years, building AI agents with full organizational context, and vibe coding against the ontology. Operators can turbocharge ancient legacy systems like their 20-year-old Siebel CRM without replacement—the old system remains underneath while BSS Magic creates modern AI-powered interfaces. Real results include 80% faster order processing, 75% cost reductions, 15% faster sales quoting, and reducing support ticket resolution from five hours to 15 minutes.