What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Unleashing AI in Telecom: TUPL's Automation and AI Revolution
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The telecommunications industry faces unprecedented challenges in operational efficiency, customer experience, and digital transformation. Enter TUPL – the quiet powerhouse revolutionizing how telecom giants handle everything from network operations to technical customer care.
Meet Rafael Ballesteros of TUPL, who shares the remarkable journey of this Seattle-headquartered company with R&D roots in Malaga, Spain. With seven years at TUPL (including a brief "boomerang" departure that brought him back), Rafa reveals how their AI-powered automation platform has become indispensable to giants like T-Mobile, where 40,000 customer care representatives use their solutions nationwide. The results? Up to 80% of customer incidents resolved automatically, saving operators hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
What sets TUPL apart is their thoughtful approach to AI integration. While embracing the capabilities of large language models, they maintain critical guardrails through traditional AI methods. "In network operations, you want to be correct almost 100% of the time – you don't want hallucinations," Rafa explains. This philosophy has earned them trust across the telecom landscape, from T-Mobile in the US to Deutsche Telekom in Europe, where their power-saving application is deployed across nearly ten countries.
Tupl built TupleOS – a no-code, low-code platform that enables rapid development of telecom solutions. This agility, combined with deep domain expertise, allows them to create and modify workflows in days rather than months, often without requiring specialized technical knowledge. Now, they're expanding beyond telecom into critical facilities management and manufacturing quality control, with their CTO relocating to Boston to strengthen their American presence.
Ready to discover how AI-powered automation can transform your operations while maintaining reliability? Explore TUPL's approach to building intelligent systems that deliver measurable results without compromising on accuracy or control.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, super excited for this chat today. We are live from the TM Forum with Tupel, a company doing some incredibly innovative work in AI and automation in the telecom domain. Rafa, how are you?
Speaker 2:Good, how are you, evan? It's a pleasure seeing you again.
Speaker 1:Yes, good to see you again. Really exciting times and you're doing so much incredible work. Before that, maybe introduce yourself and, for those who aren't familiar, the incredible journey of Tupel.
Speaker 2:Well, I've been with Tupel on and off for the last seven and a half years, and I say on and off because I'm one of those boomerangs, you know. I left Tupel, went to work for another operator that starts with a V here in the US, and then I came back to Tupel because, you know, what we're doing is really meaningful and the people that I work with matter a lot to me. But as for what I do, I'm the head of business on technology for Tupel, so I'm basically in charge for all of the Americas and all the technology and customers that we have here. Maybe, as you know, our top customer is Steamable, the big magenta, and they keep us really busy.
Speaker 1:Indeed and incredible work you're doing together. Maybe describe a little bit about some of the problems challenges you're helping solve.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so overall, on the technical customer care, we have solutions that help bridge that gap between what's happening with the customers and how to solve those problems for the customer at scale and how to solve those problems for the customer at scale. You know, in our top customer here in the US, we're deployed nationwide to solve their customer care problems. Technical customer care there are 40,000 customer care reps that are using our solutions right now, customer care reps that are using our solutions right now, and we manage basically all the incidences and resolve, you know, up to 80% of those incidences automatically. So, yeah, top, you know, helping them save millions and millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars. And also on the network operations, we automate the business as usual of network operations. We have a solution, network Advisor, which is like the higher brain of the network.
Speaker 1:It's an amazing mission and you've been at it for gosh over a decade and enter AI in the GenTIC and GenAI and you're really supercharging your solution. How are you applying AI in these complex operations?
Speaker 2:And that's a very good question, Evan, because the way that we approach it is, you know, we've applied more, you know, traditional AI, you know, to our solutions since the early days, but with the appearance of, you know, LLMs, and what we've done is use it as a new method of doing investigation with our solutions and adding this agentic layer to our solutions. But at the core, we want to keep the guardrails of our you know, both our customer care solutions and network operations solutions, because if you think about it, in the world of network operations or even technical customer cares, you really want to hit that almost 100% of the time correct, right? If you're going to do, for example, a change in the network, you know you don't want hallucinations, right. So what we've been working really hard is in keeping those guardrails with more traditional AI, you know almost, you know, in some case almost rules, right, and then adding that agentic layer where you can do, you know, ask questions, you know, trigger resolutions if you want to do it, but keeping those guardrails.
Speaker 1:Oh, so important and give us a little color into the backstory of Tupel headquartered in Seattle. You've got R&D in Spain, global presence and customers everywhere. How did you grow into such a force globally over the decade?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think if there are two things that I want to highlight about Tupol, it's probably agility as a company and being close to the customers, listening really closely to what problem we were trying to solve. And the story for Tupol is our founder, our mythical founder, which is our CTO, pablo Tapia, had this idea early on. You know, he was a very senior engineer, originally at T-Mobile, and he had worked in Nokia and other companies. You know, initially he worked in a project that would create the first self-optimizing networks or the first SON solution. But he had this idea that you needed to create a platform for doing solutions at scale, to automate the operations of operators at scale right. And that's how TupleOS, the no-code, low-code solution that we use for our applications, was born right.
Speaker 2:And, of course, he also had the idea of you know, there's a lot of talent in Spain, a lot of telco talent in Spain, and how could he leverage that? So our company was founded in Bellevue, washington. We got angel investors from the Pacific Northwest, but we also set up a big development hub in the south of Spain, in beautiful Malaga, spain, which is the birthplace of our CTO.
Speaker 1:Oh, wonderful story. And of course our industry telecom is a very old industry. I've been in it 35 years and I'm kind of a youngster, you know, going back to Alexander Graham Bell here in Boston. But what makes your approach different than some of the traditional legacy vendors that have always kind of serviced this industry?
Speaker 2:Correct, danny. I think some of the approach has to do with doing customized solutions right and trying to approach it as a. There are two ways in which you can think of this. You know you can create an ad hoc solution and then, you know, think of the updates as a developer has to do it. You know, kind of live in the life cycle of the updates as a developer has to do it, kind of live in the lifecycle of the development. It can be sprints or it can be waterfall method of doing this development and it relies on the knowledge of a specific technical person that needs to be the one that is going to do these updates or is going to update these updates or is going to update the.
Speaker 2:You know the, the models or the logic of the solution, but, um, if you think about it, the agility is brought by this low code or no code approach. You know where, um we can do um. You know new root causes or even new workflows for the applications super fast, right, and I'm talking in a matter of days, right. Sometimes changes can be done by non-experts, right. So that has been kind of the secret of our success in the telco space and the second secret that, I would say, is our deep telco knowledge, you know. So we have a set of KPIs, features that understand the telco space really well. So those KPIs, if you think performance management, call records, how to analyze these and how to turn them into actionable items for machine learning models. Right, and this has also been one of our superpowers, in which we have been able to put all these Lego pieces together to build applications really fast.
Speaker 1:Amazing and you mentioned some customers. Can you share any more stories or anecdotes about delivering really impactful, measurable results?
Speaker 2:So well we are. In T-Mobile, for example, we have 7 million analysis that we run for, going from RAN problems to telling the customer hey, we know what your issue is and help is on the way. And you know, every year we manage maybe I don't know close to half a million customer issues for our top customers In Europe. For example, in Deutsche Telekom, we were selected their power saving application for their network and we're already in 10 countries you know close to 10 countries, I think and basically helping them save energy. You know, which is in Europe is becoming. You know a bigger effort and you know mostly because you need to use this power for other things. You know a bigger effort and you know mostly because you need to use this power for other things. You know even to reinvest in technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's now a global challenge for sure, and you're at the Innovate America event with PM4. Why is it important to be there for your customers, and what's the vision behind some of the TM Forum principles that you're helping support?
Speaker 2:Well, tm Forum has become and we were, by the way, we had a booth in the TM Forum, copenhagen at Ignite, which was a wonderful event. But we like TM Forum because of their focus. I think they are. We've been, for example, in MWC and it's a massive event that you need to plan with days in advance and get all the meetings, but TM Forum is a little bit more, I would say, boutique, right, and you're able to have more meaningful conversations with, you know, of course, prospective customers, current customers T-Mobile had a big presence here in the Americas and also with other partners, right, with other companies that can help you.
Speaker 2:You know we're trying to talk to with companies like Snowflake to see how we can, you know, improve our data collection, because you know some of these partners are in operators, right, and we need to connect with them. Servicenow, you know companies like that that help us serve as data sources for our system. Right, and as far as the principles, yeah, we have aligned really well on the openness of the APIs, right, so we try to subscribe to their vision of your applications are not going to sit in an island. You're going to have to offer a way of communicating with your applications and build those APIs. You know, and I think now, in the future, these will become the agents, right, these APIs will become the agents that you can communicate with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a fantastic new opportunity, not just reshaping telecom, but other industries too. You must be looking at all kinds of adjacent use cases and opportunities, as communication gets embedded into everything and anything.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the interesting things is that we started this side of the company, that is, we call it verticals, but it's about things that are non-Telco but that can be adjacent to the Telco space.
Speaker 2:You know, for example, in that space we're trying to automate critical facilities, we're trying to automate NOC, like network operation centers, which can be, you know, they have a Telco side, but they also have a generic application, right. If you think of critical facilities, all companies have critical facilities, right, and we're trying to make those operations really fast and, you know, apply some principles of our, you know, trying to streamline those operations. You know, to other areas, you know we also dive into the, you know, quality control of factories, or, yeah, we also have a vision product that you know, in a very low price, is able to detect problems in manufacturing, and this can be applied to electronics manufacturing, but also, you know, maybe packaging solutions, right. So that's something that we're trying to bring into the US. In Europe we're already starting with these solutions, but next year will be the one where we will bring this big to the US and the Americas.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, when it comes to manufacturing and operations data centers, we can't just do things the way we've always done them. In our current environment, with changes desperately needed, what are you looking forward to over the next year or so? You have a busy plate. What's next beyond the Innovate Americans event?
Speaker 2:Well for us. I know maybe I'm giving you guys a sneak peek, but our CTO is moving back to the US. I think he'll be living in the Boston area. He'll be East Coaster like you, evan.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry that if he arrives in December, I feel quite bad for him.
Speaker 2:I told him I lived in Worcester, massachusetts, for a year and I warned him. But I think he's hell-bent on living there and you cannot. You know a guy with so much grit, you cannot convince him. But yeah, the goal would be to, of course, grow our business. I think in our current customers we have a very good runway. Starting business with other customers in the US, I think, would be a key factor that we're really getting close to and bringing that non-Telco automation to the Americas. I think that would be a good focus for 2026.
Speaker 1:Laudable goals and congratulations on so much success. You're sort of the best kept secret, not secret, in telecom. I'm not sure what that means but everyone should check out Dupal and reach out to them at the PM forum or otherwise, on LinkedIn and elsewhere. And congratulations, rafa, on all the success onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Thanks Evan. Thanks Evan. I appreciate the time that you took.
Speaker 1:Thank you and thanks everyone for listening, watching and sharing the episode, as always.
Speaker 2:Take care, Take care everyone.