Podcast

Ep 80 – What’s up with Totogi? How Totogi is bringing AI to charging

This week’s guest

Telco in 20 Featured Guest Cyrus Mistry Totogi View Linkedin profile

Cyrus Mistry

Chief Operating Officer Totogi

Today’s telcos have all but given up on monetizing the insatiable growth of mobile data usage, instead settling for one-size-fits-all pricing plans. But rather than give up the fight, Totogi is using the public cloud, AI, and data-driven algorithms to help the industry adopt dynamic, personalized pricing that maximizes the bottom line.

In this episode, Totogi’s Chief Operating Officer Cyrus Mistry joins me to talk about how Totogi’s AI-powered charging is revolutionizing the industry, how it stands out from the other legacy chargers, and why Totogi’s optimized approach presents a huge opportunity for telcos. Listen now to hear: 

  • Why revenue optimization in telco is such a big idea [04:21]; 
  • How public cloud and AI provide the one-two punch needed to enhance telco charging systems [05:05]; 
  • What separates Totogi’s future-focused, multi-tenant, SaaS solutions from on-prem chargers [06:10]; 
  • How having one model for all customers is actually a GOOD thing [09:33];

Listen to our conversation by clicking play above or subscribe through your favorite podcast platform – see the links in the right column above. 

Links and resources

  • Check out the Totogi website and find us on AWS Marketplace.
  • This episode is dropping while the Totogi team is at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Are you here too? Book a time to meet! 
  • Amazon’s method of optimizing revenue, backed by a pricing team of 16 experts and a whopping 1,400 developers, wields two acres of underground servers operating with machine learning. Read this McKinsey article from 2017 that talks about how airlines can take revenue optimization to the next level. Now that’s what I’m talking about!
  • Check out Cyrus’ Ted Talk about his simple process for optimizing all areas of our lives, from health to wealth to relationships.
  • Cyrus and I have known each other for decades. In the 1990s, we appeared together on the PBS show Livelihood, which focused an episode on our work lives at Trilogy. That’s where our hard work started and pretty much never stopped. If you want to see what I was like in 1998, give it a gander.
  • Watch the inspiration behind our Totogi music, Saturday Night Live’s fan-favorite skit, What’s up with that. Keenan Thompson kills it!
  • You can find the transcript for this episode here.
  • Listen to this conversation on our TelcoDR YouTube channel.

Wanna talk 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

Cyrus is the chief operating officer at TelcoDR and Totogi. He was previously chief operating officer at GoGuardian, one of the largest EdTech software companies in the world, and director of product management at Google, where he was responsible for the commercial Chromebook hardware and software business worldwide. Cyrus managed the enterprise, education and consumer sides of several products at Google including Android, Chrome, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Tasks, and the Google Search Appliance business. He has over 25 years of hardware and software experience with roles in product management, program management, business development, marketing, consulting, and software development. Cyrus has four degrees from Johns Hopkins, with post-graduate work in natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

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The Telco in 20 podcast won 2023 and 2022 MarCom Awards, a 2022 Hermes Award, and was recognized as a Forrester Top 100 Channel Podcast and Feedspot Top 10 Telecom Podcast.  If you enjoy the podcast, would you leave us a short review? It takes seconds to do in your app and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. And I love reading your feedback and reviews!

Podcast credits

  • Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios Royston, TelcoDR
  • Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
  • Editor/Marketing: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing
  • Editing: Andrew Condell
  • Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio
  • Music: Dyami Wilson

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why is revenue optimization such a big opportunity for telcos right now?

Telcos have largely resigned themselves to flat, one-size-fits-all pricing plans, treating their networks as commodities. But industries like aviation and hospitality have long used dynamic, data-driven pricing to maximize revenue from seemingly commodity products. Thanks to the convergence of public cloud infrastructure and modern AI tools, telcos now have everything they need to apply those same techniques—and Totogi was built from day one to help them do exactly that.

2. What makes Totogi’s AI-powered charging fundamentally different from legacy chargers?

Legacy on-premise chargers were never designed to harness AI at scale. Totogi is built as a true multi-tenant SaaS solution on the public cloud, which means all customer data is highly structured, real-time, and purpose-built for machine learning. A quick litmus test: if a vendor ever mentions a version number, it’s not true SaaS. Totogi customers simply log in and get new features automatically—no painful upgrades, no deployments. Learn more at the Totogi website or find Totogi on AWS Marketplace.

3. Why does Totogi use one shared ML model instead of building custom models for each customer?

Building and maintaining a world-class ML model requires top-tier data scientists—the kind that cost upwards of $750K annually in Silicon Valley—plus constant tuning as data and technology evolve. By investing in a single best-in-class model and distributing that cost across its entire customer base, Totogi gives every telco—including smaller MVNOs—access to Tier 1 AI capabilities they could never afford to build on their own.

4. If all Totogi customers share the same model, how do telcos differentiate from competitors?

The model is the foundation, not the differentiator. What sets telcos apart is how quickly they act on the insights the model surfaces, and how broadly they deploy them—embedding AI-driven recommendations into chatbots, CRM systems, support desks, and more. Humans are actually the rate-limiting factor: telcos that trust the model and deploy its insights widely will outperform those that override or limit it.

5. Why does training a great telco AI model require data from multiple operators, not just one?

Two things make a model truly powerful: quantity and diversity of data. A model trained on only one operator’s subscribers in one geography will always be limited. Totogi aggregates real-time charging data—running into the billions and eventually trillions of records—across diverse networks, geographies, and transaction types. That breadth is what enables accurate churn prediction and revenue optimization at scale, and it simply isn’t possible to replicate on-premise.

6. How does Danielle Rios describe Totogi’s broader vision beyond charging?

DR is emphatic on this point: Totogi is not a charging company—it’s an AI company that started with charging. The goal is to apply an AI-first, public-cloud-native mindset across every area of telco software, ultimately replacing the industry’s legacy code base. While other vendors treat the public cloud as a data center, Totogi treats it as a software ecosystem—with AWS as its cloud of choice. Check out the full conversation on the TelcoDR YouTube channel.