Network Strategy in the AI Era: What CIOs Need to Know Now

[00:00:00] Christopher Bonavita: The CIO’s job is [focused on] people, process, and technology right now, and the way that they approach their business. In this AI world, people—and the ability to give people the tools they need in order to extract value for the business—that’s a primary focus. And there’s a lot of progress there with the CIO. Technology evaluation and deployment, that’s doing fairly well now, too. What’s lagging, and what needs focus, are the processes that we’ve had up to this point to facilitate the flow of the business.

[00:00:24] Intro: Technology has transformed how we live, work, and connect. And behind that change are visionary people with bold ideas. Welcome to the BridgeCast, where host Scott Kinka explores hybrid work, AI, and our evolving future with tech’s brightest minds. Presented by Bridgepointe Technologies, the nation’s leading tech advisory firm. Experience a better way, the Bridgepointe way.

[00:01:00] Scott Kinka: Hi, and welcome to another episode of the BridgeCast. This is another one of the episodes in our series of recordings that we did here at the Bridgepointe Tech Summit in sunny Miami. Are you enjoying Miami?

[00:01:13] Christopher Bonavita: Absolutely.

[00:01:14] Scott Kinka: Joining me here is Christopher Bonavita. His current role is the VP of Strategy and Technology Adoption at GTT. I love the title. How are you?

[00:01:24] Christopher Bonavita: I’m doing very well. How could I be doing any better in the morning?

[00:01:27] Scott Kinka: Yeah, right. Are you enjoying the show?

[00:01:29] Christopher Bonavita: Absolutely. Learning a lot, hearing a lot of feedback. We do our talking, but we listen more, and we’re learning a tremendous amount.

[00:01:36] Scott Kinka: That’s awesome. So, Chris brings a wealth of experience from his time at Accenture, and then leading technology adoption security solutions at Lumen. He’s now in his current role at GTT, which we’re obviously going to talk about, around driving the future of connectivity for businesses around the globe. We are excited to dive all the way into the future of digital transformation. We’re going to solve it all in thirty minutes. You’re ready for that, right?

[00:01:58] Christopher Bonavita: Absolutely.

[00:01:59] Scott Kinka: And, obviously, what’s next for IT leaders like you who are listening at home. So, Chris, welcome to the show. We’re thrilled to have you on.

[00:02:04] Christopher Bonavita: It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m glad we got to have a conversation. We’ve known each other for a very long time.

[00:02:09] Scott Kinka: You’re going to tell us a little bit more about that as we go. We’re going to be able to connect those tissues. So, I hear it’s way back in the day. As soon as I saw you last night, I’m like, yeah. And when I saw your name, I’m like, absolutely.

[00:02:19] Christopher Bonavita: I had to scroll back a little bit too. All right.

[00:02:21] Scott Kinka: Well, we’ll get into that. You’ve had an impressive career that we’re going to get into, but let’s just do it. I mean, you’re obviously a Philly guy?

[00:02:28] Christopher Bonavita: I was born in Western PA, okay? Married a gal from Philly, made me a Philly guy. So, that’s the way that works.

[00:02:36] Scott Kinka: So, converted to life? Go Birds. Alright. Fantastic. Have you been—you’re still in Philly now?

[00:02:44] Christopher Bonavita: No, I moved down to Fort Myers.

[00:02:46] Scott Kinka: Oh, okay. So, I’m getting both coasts this week, I guess.

[00:02:48] Christopher Bonavita: This was great. Come over here for a meeting in Miami.

[00:02:52] Scott Kinka: Well, it’s the Apple thing. I love that. How long have you been in Fort Myers?

[00:02:55] Christopher Bonavita: Three years.

[00:02:55] Scott Kinka: Okay. Let’s get into it. You’ve been in technology for a long time, obviously. We’re going to holler that out. But let’s talk about the span of the career. You’re at GTT now. It was Lumen before that. It was Accenture before that. That’s pretty impressive, man. Just give us a little bit about your personal journey.

[00:03:14] Christopher Bonavita: So, I spent time in the military, got a background in linguistics and analytics. And then when I got out of the military, I found that being a Russian translator didn’t pay as well as some of the technology opportunities. Go figure, right? But I really was able to apply some of that training and some of the knowledge there, and it was really welcomed into the telecommunications industry when it was blowing up through deregulation and then the onset of the internet through the entire time.

[00:03:42] Scott Kinka: So, put it in scale—like ’93 to ’95 somewhere in the middle?

[00:03:45] Christopher Bonavita: Where are the dates? Okay.

[00:03:47] Scott Kinka: No, no, no, but I’m just like—people out there are like, “Wait a minute, the internet hasn’t always been here?” We’re talking like mid-90s. I was just trying to get this in some scale for it.

[00:03:54] Christopher Bonavita: Mid-90s. Yeah. But the onset of the internet, the real transformation in voice—really Voice over Internet technology—and that transformation was what I was a part of initially. But I’ve always had a bent towards the security aspect. So, trained as a security analyst, I always had that flavor, or people found out about it and shoved me into, “Oh, you can do security, so why don’t you do this on voice and data services?”

So, that combination of analytical experience, operational experience, and then I went into sales because that was the opportunity to interact with customers and the market. So, went through that evolution of the transformation of the industry, transformation of the technologies, and then built relationships that led to other opportunities to go learn the consulting side of the business. I’d always seen how they did it but didn’t know how they did it, so I got a chance to go over and explore that and kind of bring all the pieces together.

At Lumen, we built specialized sales teams, taking the nuance of going to market and specializing it, and creating knowledge bases of specific technologies: how you approach cloud, how you approach software-defined, and how you approach cybersecurity while you’re working with a core connectivity sale. So, all of that led to this opportunity with GTT to sit in product.

[00:05:22] Scott Kinka: Okay.

[00:05:22] Christopher Bonavita: And go look at all of the individual efforts in development, engineering, market-facing, and look for the gaps. And come in and take those gaps, test them in the market with our partners, with our customers, with the general analysts that are out there—all the folks that give us that feedback—then my job is to distill that and bring that back to our development teams and make something practical out of it. So, it’s a great position, but I don’t think I could have got here without having gone through all those different opportunities.

[00:05:52] Scott Kinka: It’s super interesting. I mean, I’ve worn product hats my entire career. That’s been what I’ve done. I’ve been a CTO and founder of a business that was, you know, a technology business. You get into an organization like GTT, and you get kind of the “right to explore” as maybe a good way to look at that.

[00:06:18] Christopher Bonavita: A great one.

[00:06:19] Scott Kinka: What was the biggest finding that came out of that? I don’t mean it negatively. I just mean, when you think about companies buying connectivity services and associated services attached to them, what was the thing that you found that either surprised you—maybe in a good way, maybe in a bad way—and how did you chase it?

[00:06:28] Christopher Bonavita: So, especially in the last ten years with the speed and evolution of the technologies and the software aspect that allows so many different variables and so many different things to hit us all at once, there was this idea that we had to do more, and more, and more. And when I got to GTT—some of this was because of the nature of the evolution of the company, some of this was the market, it’s a combination of all these things—but what was most surprising is: we need to do less better.

And in technology, you don’t hear that very much. You hear, “Let’s do more and more and add more functionality and add additional go-to-market opportunities and add this technology or that technology and bolt them together.” And specifically in GTT’s history, it caused problems by overreach, by doing too many things, having limited resources.

And we found that having that conversation about GTT and that eye-opening experience that I’ve had, relating that to our customers and into the market, there’s this consensus: “You know, you can’t do everything. Please don’t try to do everything. Please solve this that leads to other solutions, or work well with other solution providers or other technologies, but please focus on your core. And get that at a level that is as best as it can be to solve problems.” And that was surprising. Like, no, focus in here and get that done.

[00:07:50] Scott Kinka: It’s funny. I don’t know that it’s surprising to me, being here in this community. I mean, we say it all the time. Right? We’ve got our sellers providing agnostic advice to their CIOs who they work with. In many ways, we’ve supplanted the big consulting companies in specific engagements because of the way we go to market. But in a lot of ways, they’ve got this large portfolio of people, and as we’re introducing—and certainly, GTT is known—but as we’re introducing new providers, they say, “Well, here’s what we do. We have to do all this stuff.” And I was like, well, the problem is, to a customer or to the market or to a consultant who needs to pick you off the shelf, sometimes that’s hard. Like, if you do everything, you do nothing to them.

So, where’s the superpower? So, I’m going to go there to give you the opportunity to give us the commercial before we get into the rest of your career. Like, what’s the GTT superpower, even the commercial?

[00:08:46] Christopher Bonavita: The ability to focus on what we actually are investing in and delivering. And so, the superpower is being at the right place at the right time.

[00:08:57] Scott Kinka: Okay.

[00:08:57] Christopher Bonavita: And so, we didn’t do that by any specific effort that we did or by any specific thought. We actually all sat in a room and looked around and said, “Oh my goodness, look what we’ve been handed.” As opposed to, “Look what we have to create.”

So, we’ve been given—by the onset of AI tools in the last two years—the simplicity of the network infrastructure that we have, which was always a goal, but it led us to this. The ability to deploy those at speed, single ASN, you already have NFV deployed, already have certain modernized technologies deployed across the connectivity point, strong relationships on aggregated access. Those are all nuts and bolts.

What we’re able to do was come in with AI tools, break apart the databases that were actually restricting our ability to leverage all of these things efficiently, and approach it with a completely fresh approach—an AI-based approach. And when I’m talking AI, I mean assisted operational efficiency internal to the network operations. So I’m not talking about necessarily generative or agentic AI yet—we have that too, that’s helped—but we have an opportunity to layer on an AI factory on top of our entire network, get to where you’re not quite predictive but you can look at implications in real-time. When we make changes, we can adopt and adapt fast.

So the superpower there is the simplicity of what we’re dealing with and the most modern available technologies, being able to deploy those at speed. So, we’re the fourth largest ISP, so that’s big enough to play but small enough to be nimble. And combining all of those things that I just said—the latest technologies and the simplified network approach—whether we got lucky or smart or both, those are really what put us in a position to add additional value on top of that, like the software-defined services.

[00:10:55] Scott Kinka: And for listeners who may not really know the GTT story, let’s go up even one more level. Right? GTT is… like put us in a category that they would know. Is it Aggregator? Is it ISP? Is it MSP? Like how do you define GTT?

[00:11:09] Christopher Bonavita: Marketing folks have come out with: “We’re one of one.” So, we have a singular approach because we fit inside or in the middle of those things that you just described. So, we have a history over the last twenty years of aggregated access. We have a history of—especially in EMEA—outstanding global managed services. We have the network components that we still have and that we’ve modernized. So, you put all those things together, and then you layer on our own internal software development capabilities that we have a huge investment in, and the partnerships that we’ve been able to leverage associated with that development.

And we are a Global Managed Network and Security Provider. But that managed part is really interesting. We manage the baseline infrastructure as a service, and we connect, secure, and simplify that aspect, but then we offer that to our customers, to our partners, to our other vendors, to the world and say: “We’ll manage our part, but we’ll integrate with you. We’ll use most recent state API hooks and co-development opportunities to extend that baseline management into that next layer, or as far up as you want to go.”

[00:12:21] Scott Kinka: Yeah, yeah.

[00:12:22] Christopher Bonavita: And so, we’re empowering. We’re not taking it all in. We do what we do, but we empower all the other technologies to work more effectively.

[00:12:29] Scott Kinka: I get that. No, that makes a lot of sense. Um, you—and they had you out on the show circuit, I’m looking at the team back here in the room, those looking at the video—you said that connectivity and managed network services are the critical foundation of digital transformation. What does that mean to you, or what should that mean to the CIOs who are listening?

[00:12:52] Christopher Bonavita: Well, you still have to get to where you’re going. You still have to connect your devices and your people and your applications to where they need to be, and you need to manage the data flows. And so the foundation now is really attuning all of your connectivity options, all of your infrastructure options, to your desired outcomes and not being bound or restricted by legacy technologies.

So, that’s why it’s even more important. You have to create an infrastructure that enables, that doesn’t restrict via the nature of your port size, the inflexibility of certain access types, the routing restrictions, or the obligations to route your traffic and your data in a certain way in order to accommodate a data center or a core or a hyperscaler or a private cloud. Whatever those functionalities are, we were restricted by that. We were all restricted by the limitations in technology. We’re now in a place where if you take care of the connectivity and manage that connectivity appropriately, you then have all the options on defining: “What do I do to match my technologies, my other software, my ERP platforms, my supply chain, my security platforms to match my outcomes?”

I’m not as restricted. Now, more variables create a little bit more complexity. Well, you have to partner effectively—and that’s one of the things we’ll talk about: how do you partner effectively? If you’re gaining these efficiencies, make sure they don’t take anything away from the rest of your business, that it’s additive to your value.

[00:14:24] Scott Kinka: I want to read that back because I find something that’s super interesting. We just did a session downstairs that will ultimately probably air before this episode, where we got into the conversation about if you’re a legacy CIO, you’re focused on strategic initiatives, and then there’s the “keep the lights on” part of your business. And generally speaking, the network sits oftentimes in the “keep the lights on” part of the business.

But the reality of it is, it’s just so tied intrinsically to the strategic initiatives right now because the footprint of the network has changed so dramatically. It used to be that we connected as humans, went to offices, and offices connected to the Internet. And offices connected to offices. And if I was smart, I could get myself an integrated MPLS T1 that would service both my WAN and my Internet at that location. Like, let’s go. Right?

And now, not only has the technology changed, but like, what is considered core of the network—like you just mentioned—has intrinsically changed. And we now have all these little offices in people’s homes. So, is AI at the core, or the data center at the core? It’s not the office. Maybe there are offices and that’s there, but there are a zillion little offices in the field. How have you seen that change the job? Or let me say this: Have you seen that change the conversations that you have with IT leaders who maybe… and in saying this in the nicest way possible about networking… but who maybe are like, “Yeah, I’m beyond plumbing. I have somebody else dealing with plumbing in my business.” But it’s intrinsically strategic now and can’t not be. How’s that conversation, though, with CIOs?

[00:16:01] Christopher Bonavita: So, we’re having very real, very practical conversations about: what is a LAN? What is a WAN? Is there a LAN? Is there a WAN? Is there the combination of SSE-type things where direct connectivity to centralized applications, the combination of hyperscalers and so forth? So, the conversation—even the language we’re using to describe what the expected experience is—is changing. It is changing every day. And CIOs are saying, “I can’t even necessarily define the expectations other than everyone wants everything, everywhere, to be the same experience.”

So how do you describe that now in technical terms to get that outcome? And we’re solving pieces of it. We’re transforming very rapidly, so we don’t necessarily have all the answers to that. But we try to simplify the connectivity piece and the ability to layer your software options for routing and for security, and then have those other conversations about the outcomes subsequently. So it’s not a headache, it’s not a problem, and it’s also not limited. That’s the biggest part. Please don’t let my infrastructure limit my opportunity to take advantage of these new and ever-changing responsibilities for the CIO.

How my people are using different types of devices, and with AI, they have a different expectation on what that experience is every single day. And these are not just a few people sitting in their houses. This is the CEO, and the shareholders, and the rest of the market, and the people you do business with in your supply chain are all changing at the same rate. So, let’s keep consistency here, so that’s not the headache. The rest of this, we have to all sit down and have very deep, practical, honest conversations and do the best we can in the midst of all this change.

[00:17:53] Scott Kinka: One, I want to point out the one thing you said because it was profound. And you did a way better job of describing this than I have the multiple times I’ve had this conversation. “What is a LAN? What is a WAN? Well, I don’t even know what it is.” And you’re right. So, well, that’s definitely a clippable moment, I’m sure. I love what you said there.

The other thing that occurs to me when we’re thinking about this—and you’re in product and strategy, right?—does this force you to some extent be a little bit predictive around where you think your customers are going to want to land on the other side? You know, which data centers are you tying into? How are you guys with the hyperscalers? What are you doing around AI? Like, you’ve got to build—you almost have to pre-build the B-side of every one of these connections to some extent. Right? Like, how do you think about that?

[00:18:36] Christopher Bonavita: That’s a good question. There’s a lot of psychological help that goes along with trying to handle that.

[00:18:42] Scott Kinka: Well, I appreciate your transparency on that.

[00:18:45] Christopher Bonavita: I’m getting into the part of the aspect.

[00:18:47] Scott Kinka: I’m transparent, yeah. I love it.

[00:18:49] Christopher Bonavita: But I keep going back to the foundation. So, if you have a stable framework to work from, then you can start spending mental energy and collaborative, creative energy on how to handle the bigger questions of transformation and change. So, predictive… there’s some science fiction and the algorithm and some of that and the predictive capabilities. I don’t think that we’re even close to being truly predictive.

But what we do with AI, and what we do in this world, is we are much, much better suited to do anticipated implications. So, you can generate things like digital twinning. You can use AI to create a virtualized world based on real data. So you’re not drawing on a whiteboard now; you’re taking your real data in real-time and saying, “What if I changed this aspect of my infrastructure? What’s the implication?” And you can run that in parallel without having an impact on your production.

And you can do it in a simulated world that is—”simulated” is even too strong a word—that very much matches your data and your actual activity. And what’s really cool is when you can take that and then you can deploy it in a software world. Almost in near real-time. So when you can do those things, when you can change it this way—and if you’ve made a mistake, or if something changed again that you need to modify that again—you can play this implication game with the power of AI that far surpasses anything that we could do before.

So, that’s what we leverage. We think we made a really good decision. AI: How good was it? What does it really look like based on real data? Real customer data or real operational data? And then we don’t impact any customers by—if we make a mistake, if we make a foundational mistake, we catch that early. We’re not six months into a deployment and “Oh my goodness, this is what we did when we changed the configuration in South America.” We didn’t do that, that’s a hypothetical. But when we do that in a virtualized world, then you’re into this… just the implications are so much more closely attuned to what you’re trying to achieve and you can react and respond and be creative around that without the fear. “I’ve invested in something that I’ve got to make this work over the next two years.” And that trickles out into our customers now, the same implication.

[00:21:20] Scott Kinka: I was going to go there next, so thank you. Incredible anticipation. Like, you’re doing that at scale, obviously. GTT has got a global network. But does that level of, you know, whether it’s predictive or whether it’s indicative or whatever way you want to look at it… but the way you guys were thinking about grooming your network, will that find its way down to customers at some point? Is that how they’ll be planning? Or better yet, will you help them get there to be able to have access to that kind of information?

[00:21:53] Christopher Bonavita: My team’s role is to make sure that we are constantly doing what I call collaborative deployment.

[00:22:03] Scott Kinka: Okay.

[00:22:03] Christopher Bonavita: So we are in these persistent feedback loops. And because of the rate of change and the rate of accelerated change, we are constantly working with the market and with the customers—whether they’re our direct customers or they’re just folks that could be a customer and have a perspective—we are getting that constant feedback of: Are we going in the right direction? And if we are, what’s the implication for your business?

And it’s this wonderful tennis match of moments where there’s a specific point of view from a manufacturing customer, or a healthcare customer, or a global customer, or a customer that is California/New York… their specific perspectives on what this technology means to them. And that matches our view of, okay, how are we going to fulfill that next requirement or the next obligation a CIO has?

And this constant back and forth, that’s really what my team does. And it’s the demonstration and feedback, and demonstration and feedback. And that’s how we’re really able to bring the value into the market and show that incremental value on a baseline, but take advantage of the creative input from our customers. We don’t have to think of everything ourselves; take advantage of the creative input from our customers quickly.

[00:23:22] Scott Kinka: Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the beauties of AI. We’ve been having so much conversation about businesses, you know… “Oh, well, they’ve had failed AI pilots, and they were trying to do this because they’re running for the fences.” And I mean, very often, I meet with CIOs, and I’m like, “Maybe the first thing you should do is just turn it on securely and see what your employees do with it.” By the way, they’re probably already doing it because there are a zillion Chat GPT accounts and illegal LLMs in your business already.

[00:23:45] Christopher Bonavita: No one wants to admit that. Yeah.

[00:23:46] Scott Kinka: But that’s the fastest-growing shadow IT app in history at this point. Getting off of that for a moment… and then I’ve got some fun wrap-up for us. Coming from your angle, and you speak to CIOs all day—I love when I have product leaders on here, right? One, because it’s my background, but two, it’s generally so customer-focused at the end of the day. So you’re speaking directly to the CIOs who are listening and you have the CIOs every day.

Can you offer something? I would say either something they should know that you wish they even put into practice, or just a bit of advice for prepping for everything that’s about to come their way, as the next wave of technology is largely AI-driven. Get up on the soapbox for a minute. Give us something to figure out.

[00:24:33] Christopher Bonavita: The CIO’s job is people, process, and technology right now, and the way that they approach their business and associating what they do with the rest of the business. In this AI world, people—and the ability to give people the tools they need in order to extract the value to the business—that’s a primary focus. And there’s a lot of progress there with the CIO.

The technology—technology evaluation and deployment—that’s doing fairly well now too. What’s lagging and what needs focus are the processes that we’ve had up to this point to facilitate the flow of the business. That’s where the stress is because there are folks that are deploying, they’re learning, they’re upgrading their skills, they’re upskilling, and you have the human aspect of it. You have the tools that are enabling efficiencies. But your processes are being strained because it’s a completely different way of doing business. It’s not just an incremental change to the process. These two things on the side—your people and technology—require a completely new step back to look at those processes.

And where the trap is, is that most of the processes with very talented people up to this point are good. They’re not good enough in this next world. They’re good for right now. So when you’re talking to someone about, “I have the people and I have the technology but this process is…” it’s not broken. It’s just limited. So we need to take a step back and look at, when we’ve gotten some progress on the human evolution and the efficiency of the business and the technology you’re supporting that, these processes on how you deliver, on how you measure, on how you optimize—all of those are dependent on both aspects of your AI enablement on either side. And try not to let the processes… or hold tight to these processes that worked and that feel like they’re working today. They’re cracking, and you need to spend a little bit of time on that. On a soapbox, we need to spend a little bit more time together on that to say: How do we treat the processes? And in some cases, it’s going to be a new process.

[00:26:41] Scott Kinka: I mean, AI doesn’t fix… we run into this in the CX implementations all the time. So like, “Oh, we’re gonna turn on the robots.” So if it’s not written down, it’s not learning something that you can count on. I mean, it doesn’t make up for bad process. And I love your point too about—and maybe you didn’t say it this way, but this is what I took out from a paraphrasing perspective—which is: you would have an eighty-fifth percentile process with human delivery. You can’t have an eighty-fifth percentile process when you’re asking machines to operate on it. And at the end of the day, is that a reasonable way of describing where you were going?

[00:27:12] Christopher Bonavita: You’re not gonna be able to catch up. Because it’s gonna move so quickly. Just throwing another body at it, or throwing a very skilled body at it, isn’t going to be able to catch up to the three shifts of AI that were working completely before the person gets in.

[00:27:25] Scott Kinka: I think that’s a great segue into a couple of fun questions. It’s been fun. Now we’re going to do more. I need a shameless prediction, something bold. It can be around AI if you choose. You could tell me that the Eagles are going to win the Super Bowl too, that’d be awesome. But, getting a prediction so they can look back…

[00:27:45] Christopher Bonavita: I predict this: that the Penguins and the Flyers games are going to be wonderful this year. So I’ll predict…

[00:27:51] Scott Kinka: Spirited. Absolutely.

[00:27:54] Christopher Bonavita: Borderline scary.

[00:27:56] Scott Kinka: Do you have a hot take? Sorry.

[00:27:57] Christopher Bonavita: Oh, sorry. So, the prediction relevant to AI is: there’s a lot of fear right now on AI taking jobs. And AI will take the jobs of those folks that don’t embrace AI. But for anyone that embraces AI, even incrementally, it’s just going to change your job. It’s going to make those jobs slightly different. You’re going to be able to take human creativity and human approach to managing AI and leveraging AI.

And what I predict is that there will be jobs that we haven’t even imagined, that AI is going to tell us how we can use AI better and how we can be more creative. And so the thing that we’re holding off to a certain extent—if I’m in an operations department and I don’t want AI to take my job—AI is gonna tell you how you can use AI and become a better human using AI. So don’t fear it, embrace it as something that’s your partner in making you better and your career path better, your own skill sets better. That’s the kind of tool it is.

[00:29:03] Scott Kinka: Alright. Hot take. I like it. I like it. Alright. What are you reading? We like it. We like to recommend books here. Is there anything that you’ve wanted to—

[00:29:09] Christopher Bonavita: So I gotta give you two because you need balance. So, you all know Harari and Nexus, and then I went back… I read Nexus and then I’ve been going back and Sapiens and [Homo Deus], and the way that he presents the evolution of human beings and the evolution of AI, and then he connects them with historical references and he creates this human foundation for relating to this… he calls it Alien Intelligence, not even Artificial Intelligence, it’s completely new.

So, in going through that, it’s incredibly enlightening, but there are moments of abject terror in some of the things that he promotes. So I also go back and I’m rereading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So I can laugh and balance that out a little bit and just open the mind a little bit. So I recommend anything that Mr. Harari has written.

[00:29:56] Scott Kinka: I love that. Last one on the fun side. And given your reading, you can choose whichever future you want. But we’re in some dystopian future of some kind. And there’s one app that’s still working on your phone. Which one is it?

[00:30:14] Christopher Bonavita: Um, as a human being, I would say Calm. And if Matthew McConaughey can just read me a book and just keep me okay, I’ll be all right. I would say if the world was ended, I’d partner that way. I know you said one, but I’ll take two again, why not? Um, something like a Coursera or something along those lines. So I have the font of all human knowledge that I can refer back to at the end of times and maybe help me survive a little bit and get through the next day.

[00:30:42] Scott Kinka: I love that. Well, and with one quick thing around GTT, tell us something that maybe our listeners wouldn’t know about GTT.

[00:30:53] Christopher Bonavita: GTT has invested a tremendous amount of money, time, and resources in the AI enablement of our AI factory on our core, of our digital experience, of going into that API and AI cognitive network around our experience and our edge, our universal edge and a great approach to that software-defined world on connectivity.

But what we wanna emphasize is we are investing a relatively equal amount in our people. And it’s still the people; it’s still the people that you’re gonna be interacting with. You may do certain paths through AI or through agentic AI interfaces, and that’s great—automate those. But the investment in our people, we don’t broadcast that as much. That’s what’s gonna keep us relevant and keep us ahead of the curve.

[00:31:45] Scott Kinka: I love it. And a great way to end. We talk a lot about AI, keep the human in the loop or human-centered AI at the end of the day. Thank you, Chris, for being here. This is really awesome. We appreciate the partnership with GTT. We’re glad you guys are here. And we will hopefully see you again on a future episode of the BridgeCast.

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[00:32:20] Scott Kinka: Listen. If you made it this far, there must have been some good content, or you’re just a fan or a relative of mine. In either case, we appreciate you spending your most valuable asset with us: your time. We don’t take that lightly.

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Check out bridgepointetechnologies.com. Don’t forget the ‘e’ on Bridgepointe. Or simply reach out to me at skinka@bpt3.net. Also, take a minute, please, if you would, to give us a five-star review on your favorite platform. It helps give us the visibility to reach other people like you. Thanks for listening to this episode of The BridgeCast. I’m Scott Kinka. And until next time, there’s a lot of noise out there in business and in life. Do what you can to be the signal.