- Globe Telecom is using AI to boost internal productivity through low-code tools and employee-led innovation
- The company built a reusable AI infrastructure to avoid vendor lock-in and streamline complex deployments
- Security remains central to Globe’s AI strategy, balancing innovation with strict safeguards
DTW IGNITE, COPENHAGEN — Globe Telecom's Anton Reynaldo Bonifacio was in San Francisco attending a conference last year when he got a call from then-CEO Ernest Cu, who was visiting China. Impressed by Chinese AI innovation, Cu tapped Bonifacio to head up AI for Globe Telecom.
"I knew what my title was even before I knew what my job was," Bonfiacio said at a keynote presentation here. That title is impressive: Executive Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Chief AI Officer for Globe Telecom.
And he now knows what the job is: strategic AI planning, development and enablement, implementation, operations, governance and compliance.
The goal for the first six months was to generate immediate impact. The fastest means of doing that was to improve internal productivity, empowering employees with the right tools to become citizen developers, using low-code and no-code tools and access to Google Gemini. The grassroots initiative is a better alternative to top-down mandates, Bonifacio said — "empower[ing] people to be able to solve their own problems."
Globe Telecom established an AI advocacy working group, which had 1,300 sign-ups in the first few weeks out of a 6,000-employee population. "We ran a campaign called 'Make work fun again,' which was one of the battle cries," Bonifacio said.
Cooking up smarter AI
But grassroots implementations are not enough. "There's going to be some business requirements that I can't rely on citizen development to be able to build," Bonifacio said. It was important to also build top-down infrastructure for complex use cases.
"Just like I knew the job title before I knew the job, in a lot of ways I knew what not to do rather than immediately knowing what to do," Bonifacio said.
He knew Globe Telecom did not want to replicate errors that many telcos and communications service providers made in their legacy environments and the cloud, where they reinvent the same infrastructure repeatedly for separate use cases.
Bonifacio used a kitchen metaphor to describe Global Telecom's AI deployment strategy.
"Every top-down use case is like a dish. Business is hungry. They want Chinese food, or maybe they want steak. Imagine we have to build a separate kitchen for each use case, with separate components and separate appliances, engaging different partners. We're going to wind up in the same nightmare we're in now, where you've got vendor-locked, overlapping technologies," Bonifacio said.
For Global Telecom's kitchen, reusable appliances include common AI landing zones, which are pre-configured cloud environments designed to help quickly and securely deploy AI workloads. Also included are an observability stack, LLM guardrails, data and Terraform scripts.
Also, many generative AI solutions have common reusable components, Bonifacio noted. "You really don't need 10 different vendors for every use case," he said.
AI with a side of security
Of course, AI requires security, which is the other part of Bonifacio's job.
"I'm both the Chief AI officer and Chief Information Security Officer," he said.
Global Telecom has strict information security policies. For example, it won't deliver any SMS message that has a link in it, to protect customers from malicious messaging. "It's not even URL filtering or domain filtering — if the SMS has a link, we block it," Bonifacio said. That same philosophy carries over to innovation.
You have to be safe to innovate," he said. "That's where a lot of companies, not just operators, get stuck sometimes. There is so much fear from a security perspective," he said. That fear stifles innovation.
"We've had great results already," Bonifacio said. For example, its B2B team built its own quality assurance chatbot for incoming call center calls, a function that had previously been outsourced to partners. A nontechnical team built the service using APIs and low-code/no-code tools.
Looking ahead, Global Telecom wants to collaborate with its business and consumer customers on innovation. "We'd like to empower our customers to cook in the same kitchen so they can actually collaborate with us," Bonifacio said.
Catch all of our coverage from this year's DTW Ignite show here.