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Ep 148 – To G, or not to G (Stefan Pongratz)
Dell’Oro Group analyst Stefan Pongratz breaks down the real economics of moving to a new G—and what makes the 6G cycle different.
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Ep 149 – Microsoft deploys the FDEs (Kevin Shatzkamer)
This week’s guest
Kevin Shatzkamer
CVP, Engineering Telecom & Media Studio at Microsoft Frontier Company MicrosoftEvery telco has hundreds of AI use cases, dozens of pilots, thousands of agents. So why can’t they get to production at scale?
I sat down with Kevin Shatzkamer, corporate vice president of the Telco and Media Engineering Studio at Microsoft Frontier Company, the hyperscaler’s new operating unit. His team embeds forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) at enterprise customers to build and run AI at scale.
Listen now to hear:
- Where AI actually breaks inside a telco [05:13];
- What happens when Frontier engineers embed at an operator [08:38];
- The real bottleneck for running AI at scale [09:30]; and
- What telcos bring to the table that Microsoft can’t manufacture [14:09].
Links and resources
- Read the announcement of Microsoft Frontier Company—the hyperscaler’s $2.5B, 6,000-engineer bet on embedding teams inside enterprise customers.
- Learn about Frontier’s outcomes-first model, where success is measured by the customer’s business result rather than the product shipped.
- Check out Kevin’s LinkedIn post about taking the Telco and Media lead position for Frontier Company.
- Want to go from idea to production in days instead of months? This is how Totogi builds: FDEs and twice-weekly capability sprints, feedback to shipped code by Thursday.
- Kevin mentions John Chambers, the former Cisco CEO who said, “the Internet will change the way we work, live, learn, and play.” Read his thoughts on AI’s impact, including moving five times faster than the internet, with bumpy jobs transitions along the way.
- Catch me with VIVA Bolivia CEO Ryan Alvarez at TM Forum’s Innovate Americas in Dallas on October 6, where we make the fast-cadence thesis concrete. Ryan runs every cell site as its own P&L on the Totogi Ontology. We’ll walk through the next-G upgrade calls VIVA is weighing right now.
- My advice to kids going to college in the Age of AI? Become an expert! Just like Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel-san karate. Wax on, wax off.
- 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
Kevin Shatzkamer is a corporate vice president of engineering at Microsoft Frontier Company, leading the Telco and Media industry verticals and customer experience transformation across industries. With more than 20 years of experience driving AI, digital transformation, and technology innovation, he partners with customers to design and scale enterprise AI solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes. Prior to Microsoft Frontier Company, he led Strategy and Operations for Microsoft’s Customer Experience & Success organization. Kevin is the author of two technology books, holds more than 50 patents, and earned degrees from the University of Florida, MIT, and Indiana University.
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- 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 did Microsoft launch the Microsoft Frontier Company?
The Microsoft Frontier Company is a $2.5B, 6,000-engineer bet on embedding teams inside customers. The unit’s engineers work directly inside customer environments to co-design, co-deploy, and continuously improve AI systems, with success measured by business outcomes rather than shipped software. Read Microsoft’s Frontier launch announcement and learn what Frontier Company offers in its outcomes-first model.
2. Where does AI break down inside telcos?
According to Kevin Shatzkamer, AI rarely fails in the demo. It breaks down at the operational seams: fragmented data, decades of legacy systems, regulatory obligations, and workflows spanning network, customer care, field service, security, and commercial operations. A model can perform well in isolation yet still fail without business context, permissions, observability, and escalation paths, which is why telcos need to treat AI adoption as a structural capability, not a point solution.
3. What happens once Frontier engineers embed at a telco?
Frontier teams start with a business outcome, not a model. They observe how work actually runs—not just documented processes—to spot where people compensate for missing context, where approvals stall, and where risk enters the system. From there, they identify the smallest production workflow that proves the new operating model, run it, and build learning loops for quality, adoption, and business results before scaling further.
4. What’s the real bottleneck to scaling AI in telecom?
Kevin Shatzkamer argues it’s not the AI model, the cloud, the data, or even engineering capacity. It’s transformation capacity, or how fast an idea can move from pilot to production. Telcos already have hundreds of use cases, dozens of pilots, and thousands of agents; the challenge is building the operating discipline to turn that activity into measurable, scaled outcomes rather than accumulating more proofs of concept.
5. How does Totogi’s approach compare to Microsoft’s Frontier model?
Danielle Rios notes that Totogi already builds this way: forward-deployed engineers work alongside customers with twice-weekly capability sprints, turning feedback into shipped code within days rather than months. It’s the same “idea to production” gap Kevin Shatzkamer describes closing for telco customers through the Microsoft Frontier Company, built on short, capability-driven cycles instead of multi-year transformation programs.
6. What question should telco execs ask about their AI transformation?
In her takeaway, Danielle Rios suggests asking one question: what’s our cycle time from idea to production? If the answer is months, the issue isn’t AI—it’s transformation capacity. DR unpacks this further with VIVA Bolivia CEO Ryan Alvarez, who runs every cell site as its own P&L on the Totogi Ontology, at TM Forum’s Innovate Americas in Dallas, Texas, on October 6, 2026.