The Great Indoors

Everyone wants to talk about AI. Far fewer are ready to deal with what it actually demands.

Recorded live at Mobile World Congress 2026, this episode of The Great Indoors pairs two sharply different but deeply connected conversations about the future of enterprise technology. In the first, Kathleen Mitford, Corporate VP, Global Industry Marketing at Microsoft, joins Liliana Schwartz Bruner, Amdocs GM, and Matthew Roberts to explain why AI leadership can no longer sit inside technical teams alone. As organizations push to become frontier organizations, AI is beginning to reshape not just productivity, but how marketing, sales, and leadership work together, how decisions are made, and how new growth opportunities are identified. The message is clear: the future will not belong to companies that simply adopt AI tools, but to those that know how to apply them with purpose.

The second conversation, with Chris Antlitz, Principal Telecom Analyst at TBR, as he steps back to examine the wider landscape. Here, the focus shifts to sovereignty, trust, infrastructure constraints, geopolitical pressure, and the growing sense that the market is entering a necessary recalibration. From satellite and quantum to the limits of current AI deployment, Chris offers a candid assessment of what is real, what is overestimated, and what business leaders should be watching next.

Enterprise AI is no longer about experimentation alone. The real challenge now is scaling it in a way that delivers measurable value, holds up operationally, and avoids descending into chaos.

In this episode of The Great Indoors, Matthew Roberts is joined by Mark Austin, Vice President of Data Science and AI at AT&T, for a grounded conversation on what it really takes to industrialize AI inside a large enterprise. With generative AI now making up the majority of his organization’s work, Mark explains why governance, ROI discipline, and structured execution have become essential to moving from isolated projects to enterprise-wide impact. Together, they explore the difference between “vibe coding” and what Mark calls AI fuel coding, why fine-tuned models may offer the rare combination of better, faster, and cheaper, and how AT&T is thinking about agents, orchestration, and AI systems that can operate at scale.

At the Mobile World Congress 2026, one theme rose above everything else: generative AI. Amdocs CEO, Shimie Hortig, joins The Great Indoors to discuss the shift from AI excitement to real-world execution. As generative AI dominates the conversation, Shimie explains that while the technology is advancing at extraordinary speed, enterprise adoption remains far behind. The result is what he calls the “value gap” which is the growing distance between what AI is capable of and what organizations are actually able to implement in ways that deliver measurable results.

Together with Matthew Roberts, Shimie explores why closing that gap is so difficult, from security and integration to compliance and organizational change. Recorded live in Barcelona, the episode also captures the intensity of MWC itself and the importance of direct customer feedback in shaping what comes next. At its core, this is a conversation about moving from possibility to practice and about what it will take for the industry to turn AI momentum into real business value.

At MWC Barcelona 2026, the conversation around AI is no longer confined to software. It is becoming physical, personal, and deeply tied to the future of connectivity.

In this episode, Matthew Roberts welcomes Don McGuire, EVP & Chief Marketing Officer at Qualcomm, back to the podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on what AI-native networks, emerging device form factors, and the next era of telecom could really mean in practice. From Qualcomm’s latest announcements around 6G, wearable platforms, agentic modems, and Wi-Fi 8 to the bigger question of how operators evolve in an AI-first world, Don lays out a vision in which connectivity becomes more intelligent, more anticipatory, and more embedded in everyday life.

The discussion also explores the role of the modern CMO in navigating AI’s competing narratives, why human-led and AI-powered may be the most important balance for marketers to get right, and how younger generations are already treating AI less like a tool and more like a thought partner.

MWC Barcelona 2026 made one thing clear: the telecom industry is entering a new phase, where AI feels more tangible, policy feels more urgent, and innovation is being judged by its real-world impact.

In this episode, Matthew Roberts welcomes Lara Dewarr, CMO of the GSMA, back to the podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on what this year’s event revealed about the future of connectivity. From AI’s shift into more embodied, agentic, and consumer-facing experiences to the growing importance of inclusion, regulation, and practical use cases, Lara offers a front-row view of where the industry is heading next. She reflects on 20 years of MWC in Barcelona, the role the event plays in bringing together industry and government, and why marketers, operators, and policymakers are now all grappling with the same challenges. The conversation also explores the risk of leaving communities behind in the AI era, the need for more locally relevant technology, and why sectors like healthcare may be next in line for telecom-led transformation.

So if you are interested in the absolute latest from MWC and what it means for telecom on a larger scale, press play!