scte PRESENTS
FUTURE OF TECH OPEN SESSION: Q and A
Anthony Daly, director of ClimateEQ, struck a more optimistic note, saying the focus should be on practical benefits rather than fear. “I think AI can
or simply chasing cost reduction. Nock argued that too much of the focus remains on cutting expenditure rather than generating new revenue or better services. The panel also turned to what this means for telecoms operators as connectivity becomes more commoditised. While margins may remain under pressure, speakers were clear that communications itself will remain essential. As Nock put it: “Communication is always going to be required. Data is always going to have to go from A to B.” That leaves open the question of where value will sit in future – in infrastructure ownership, orchestration, applications or services – but the discussion suggested operators may increasingly need to think of themselves as infrastructure providers in a broader digital system. Closing the session, Basham argued that the day’s debates had not really been about a single technology at all. “Today hasn’t been about a single technology. It’s been about something bigger – it’s been about systems,” he said. “The future of technology is not about individual platforms, it’s about how everything connects.”
AI debate shifts from hype to infrastructure and governance
The Open Session that brought The Future of Tech day to a close saw the AI debate move on from novelty into how the technology is governed, where it creates value, and how it fits into the wider communications and infrastructure ecosystem.
be used for good, and the focus should be on AI for good, not the negatives,” he said. He pointed to training as one example, arguing that the ability to create material once and scale it instantly across multiple languages could deliver real value for workforce development.
Consultant Ian Nock urged delegates to keep AI in perspective. “Treat this as software. Don’t treat it as some friend or some humanistic personification,” he
SCTE president Dr Anthony Basham, who hosted the session, said AI is no longer something theoretical for the industry. “AI is moving from that concept to be an
said, arguing that AI outputs should be handled with the same caution as search results. “You only trust the references, and you qualify the information.”
infrastructure layer. It’s something you need and require,” he said, pointing to growing use cases in automation, service optimisation and workflow management. Even so, several speakers argued that the sector is still firmly in the hype cycle. Nock said too many organisations are deploying AI because of the label rather than the use case. “We are still in the hype,” he said. “Not everything is better with AI, only certain things.” That led to a broader discussion about value creation and whether businesses are using AI to create new opportunities
That need for scrutiny was echoed by Ben Allwright, founder of Allwright Advisory, who said AI remains an immature technology despite the
speed of development. “It feels to me that it is still a very early-stage technology,” he said. His main concern was not the concept of AI itself, but the quality of the data and oversight behind it. “What concerns me most is who’s managing, who’s governing AI, and the quality of the data sets it’s acting upon.”
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MAY 2026 Volume 48 No.2
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