AI-Ran to Interconnected Realities — Nokia's Leslie Shannon

Fred Schonenberg

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries podcast. I'm your host, Fred Schonenberg. I'm so excited today to have Leslie Shannon joining us. Leslie is the Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting at Nokia, where she specializes in identifying disruptive technologies that are shaping the future of connectivity. Recently, she delivered a keynote address at CES, focusing on the impact of generative AI on the entertainment industry, and we will dive into that. 

Leslie has a tremendously strong background in everything from augmented reality to virtual reality, robotics, cloud gaming. She is an accomplished author of two influential books, Interconnected Realities, which explores the metaverse, and Virtual Natives. Her insights make her a leading voice in discussions about innovation and its societal implications. She's one of my all-time favorite dinner guests. Anytime we have an innovation dinner, she's the first person I think of because she sparks such interesting and passionate conversation. So I'm excited to finally have her on the podcast. Leslie, thank you so much for joining us.

Leslie Shannon

Fred, what an intro. Thank you so much. Now I need to try to live up to all that glory.

Fred Schonenberg

Oh, trust me. I mean, it's always, the best part is it never goes, you know, it's not the obvious line. We get into very passionate conversations about all different things. So I'm going to try and keep us on track more than normal. It’ll be fun regardless. So, you know, you're in the intro, right? Head of a Trend and Innovation Scouting at Nokia. What are your responsibilities with that type of role and how do you identify emerging technologies that, you know, can disrupt the connectivity landscape? 

Leslie Shannon

Yeah. So, you know, just got to say the caveat to begin with, Nokia doesn't make phones anymore. I just want to put that out there. I've been with the company for 25 years. I've always been on the network side, which is what we always did in addition to the phones. 

We're a telecommunications equipment vendor. There we go. That's what I was looking for. And so we make all the hardware and software that it takes to run a telecommunications network. And we sell those to the large phone companies and the small phone companies and the large enterprises to build networks with. Now, infrastructure on that scale is a massively expensive undertaking and it requires a lot of strategic planning, right?

Imagine you're the CEO of a telco. You need to be thinking 10 years out. Like, how am I going to be developing my network? What do I need to be doing? And say like, okay, and you've got your vendors, people like our company, who are in your face saying, buy this, buy that. How do you decide what to do? What I try to do is I try to help cut through the noise and the bluster by showing examples of what companies are doing today that are indicating what the new technologies might be tomorrow.

If, say, a CEO has, you know, here is network option A and here is network option B, and they're different strategic paths and I need to make that decision now, then what I try to do is I try to show these are the things that are out there that mean that it's more likely there's going to be more new things that require the support of network option A rather than B. That's the long form. But how do I choose out of all the stuff that's out there? How can I have enough confidence to say network option A looks better? It's about what solves problems fundamentally. There's all these new ideas all the time.

Innovation happens everywhere surrounding us. We're bathing in it constantly. But there's a lot of stuff out there that seems like a, you know, kind of fun idea, but does it really solve a problem? Does it solve a problem in a way that is better, faster, cheaper than what the alternative is right now? And, for example, I just came from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, and some of my favorite things, there's a whole startup area where there's like lots of small companies with crazy ideas.

One of the ones that I saw multiple, and this was really strange. I'd never seen this before, multiple countertop dishwashers that will wash like two plates and a fork in five seconds. I'm like, that's great, except you know what? There's a sink right here already built into my counter. And I can just turn on the water and rinse my plate. Five seconds, look, I'm done. So it's like, I'm not sure that one's really solving a problem.

But another one that I saw was a cat door where they actually had a little camera with visual analytics with AI calculating. When the cat approaches the door, if it sees that the cat has a mouse or a bird in its mouth, it refuses to open the door. For those who have had an outdoor cat, you know, that solves a problem of the half-dead mouse on the living room floor. That one's got legs, I tell you.

Fred Schonenberg

Or not legs, depending on if you're the cat or the mouse.

Leslie Shannon

Legless mouse. But then the question is going to be in the implementation. If it costs $500,000 to put that cat door in, or if it's some gigantic piece of thing that hangs on the door, then that's not going to work. But anyway, does it solve the problem? Is it elegant? Is it useful? That's really, that's my criteria. 

Fred Schonenberg

So let me ask you this. Obviously, you're talking about big infrastructure type plays and sort of, I love your what's happening now to indicate what the future might be. One of the phrases we use a lot at VentureFuel is like, what's next now, which is sort of the reverse of that, right? 

Leslie Shannon

Perfect. Exactly that.

Fred Schonenberg

Like, hey, look what's happening now. That's how you get to next. But how do you think about it in an industry where the really big swings, and 10 years out, those problems evolve, right, and they change over time? How do you make sense of that sort of disparity or conflict?

Leslie Shannon

Well, I'm actually looking for the big patterns, the big macro patterns. One of the patterns that we're looking at right now is the question of, as AI and all kinds of flavors of compute get more and more integrated into all kinds of things around us, including the cat door, the question, where does the computing sit? That's the question that I'm looking at because that is something where there's a possibility for the computing to sit in the network. And then that's an opportunity for the network to change.

Right now, the network is kind of connecting things that do computing, but the network itself doesn't really host any computing. Is there an opportunity for that? Is that a change that we'll be seeing? That's the kind of question that I'm looking at. Yeah, it's the abstracting it up to the – and then if I see not just the cat door, but the microwave oven, the this, the that, the 97 other things, then that's when I can say, look, there is a trend towards lots of computing needing to go into these end devices. 

But guess what? It might be too expensive to put the computing into the end device. It might make sense for that computing to sit in the network. If our industry builds it, then there are enough things from other multiple industries that might use it to justify that expense. That's actually one of the things I'm really looking at right now.

Fred Schonenberg

I love that. Was there anything that came out of CES this year that stood out as an exciting trend or an innovation? It can be a specific one if you want, but if you go to a dinner party tonight and they're like, what did you see at CES that is indicative of the future? What would be your first thoughts?

Leslie Shannon

Okay, before I got there, I read all these articles of some kind of advanced things, and they're saying like, oh, AI is everywhere. And yes, it was. But there were two things that surprised me. First up was the fact that AI was everywhere, but it wasn't in the way that kind of previous trends have been at a show like that, where like blockchain, for example, a few years ago, like every standard. And now with blockchain, right? Then you go and you're like, well, how is blockchain? This one, people weren't, and companies weren't saying, we have AI. It was kind of assumed that everyone had AI. And the way that you could really see it was that everything worked. Like, just worked. 

AI is the oil flowing behind the scenes on the ball bearings of multiple industries. Now things are genuinely working well and meeting the promise that products had. And so I saw far more successful demos this year than I ever have had before. AI was kind of the magic juice behind the scenes that led to all those successful demos. So that was number one.

Number two was the commonality that I really saw across multiple products and industries was that AI was being heavily used in the interface. And so the understanding of the context of the situation, like the visual analytics to understand does the cat have something in its mouth or not, that's one example. Also being able to use lots of visual analytics of the situation before a decision is made and something happens. 

Or using AI for the audio interface with the human being. So a human being being able to say to, say, a television, oh yeah, can you make the brightness a little bit brighter, you know, or whatever. Rather than using voice to navigate specifically through a series of menus. Instead being able to just be much more human about it. Yeah, and so this year it was really the interface. AI for the interface for much more naturalistic and better understanding of the context.

But I didn't see so much in terms of AI making a difference in the outcomes. Because I think we're not to the point of trusting AI to work autonomously. But I think give it a little time, I think that'll be the next wave of what we'll see next year and beyond.

Fred Schonenberg

Very interesting. Well, this kind of brings me to your keynote. The Hollywood trajectory, generative AI timeline, 2025 to 2030. I think that it is such an interesting industry to think about AI and how generative AI could impact it across a variety of different ways. Can you share some of your key points that you were talking about? 

Leslie Shannon

Yeah, actually I need to clarify. This was part of a panel. I was one of a number of panelists.

Fred Schonenberg

Okay.

Leslie Shannon

And this was part of Digital Hollywood, which runs the day before CES. It's an event associated with CES. And it's a huge shout out to Digital Hollywood. It's a really fascinating event to go kind of see, as you just said, through this particular industry. Basically the first thing that all the panelists did was throw out the assumption that we could in any way predict what things are going to be like in 2030. 

Fred Schonenberg

Yeah, that's a good start.

Leslie Shannon

It's just not possible, right? It's like, yeah, let's talk about what we might see in the next six months. But the kinds of things that we're talking about are the ability, for example, to use AI to regionalize advertising and other kinds of cultural things. For example, here I am, and I'm an actress in some kind of sitcom. And I pick up, this is actually a Danish CD, DVD set, actually. In Denmark, I'm picking up this Danish DVD set. But when exactly the same show airs in, I don't know, the United States, then instead I'm holding up an American thing.

All that kind of stuff done seamlessly. So for cultural relevance, but also for advertising. So here I am eating Taco Bell in America, but I'm eating a Hesburger in Sweden. Yeah, that is something. That's the ability to digitally change and to make these digital changes in real time so that you don't have 97 years of post-production on every kind of media. But instead, things are actually being done much closer to the actual time of shooting or actually in the time of shooting.

And so the ability to really create all kinds of things, also with much smaller teams. One of the things that kept coming up was the democratization of media creation. Because yes, we'll still have the really big Warner Brothers, big media houses. But also, the tools are now so good that Soonyi from Korea or somebody from Sierra Leone can actually now also create extremely high standard things on their own or with a very small team and find an audience for them. And I think we're going to see huge shakeups in the media industry in terms of the democratization of people's voices.

Fred Schonenberg

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. There was a startup that has been on the podcast, actually. Very early on, we put more startups on the podcast. There's a company called Ryff, R-Y-F-F, that was doing this sort of, I would call it, product placement using at that point, I don't know if they were even using the word AI as they described it, right? But the idea of sort of changing out the beer can for a soda can or changing based on geography. I love that. 

I think this democratization idea of anybody can be creative. Now, that sort of started with the mobile phone. But now, with these tools, you can actually be a great creative. And there's an audience to be found. Exactly.

Leslie Shannon

Exactly. This goes back to what I said before about it's AI enabling ideas that have been around for a long time, but now they really work. And they work well. They work with tools that are affordable and generally available for wide swaths of the population. So, that's the – yeah. So, it wasn't so much new ideas. 

Actually, that was really interesting because whenever I met other people who were also kind of around CES, they were like, have you seen anything really new and exciting? And it's like, well, no, not really, not this year. Then after a few days of that, I realized, oh, no, but what I am seeing is a lot of previous ideas actually working. And so, it took me a little bit to realize that that's what the huge takeaway was. 

Fred Schonenberg

I think one of the challenges of the role that you have and the role that I have is you see some things way before they're ready for primetime. And then five years later, they start to come out. You're like, yeah, I've been talking about that for five years.

Leslie Shannon

Yeah, it's old hat, you know. We were talking about it. But now it's possible for it to actually be done. Yes.

Fred Schonenberg

I wanted to see how does this tie into the two books I mentioned that you've written, Interconnected Realities and Virtual Natives? Is there a tie-in to things that you explored in that book that now you see coming to fruition as AI is sort of becoming the oil to make these things happen?

Leslie Shannon

Yeah, I mean, Interconnected Realities is really about the development of virtual spaces and the development of, I don't know, virtual, the incorporation of digital things with our physical world. So, that one is still in progress but for me, virtual reality with the goggles and stuff, that's great. I love it. I do all of my fitness in that world. And I completely love it. But for me, the real change is going to be augmented reality glasses. We're starting to actually see augmented reality glasses. There were a lot of them at CES this year, and they work great.

The surprise is, and the thing that I didn't foresee, is that the first way that we're getting that digital representation of kind of additional knowledge beyond what is available to me through my senses here in the physical space is that it's coming in through audio.

Fred Schonenberg

Yeah.

Leslie Shannon

Right. So, it's AI talking to you through the glasses earpiece rather than getting visual stuff, because the visual stuff is really hard to create in a meaningful way. But the audio is much easier. The concept, and this is a reminder, we can have an idea, we can have a concept of how things might develop, but we can get the details wrong. And, three, four years ago, nobody, audio existed, nobody realized that it would actually be that's the entry point for all of this.

Yeah. And then Virtual Natives, that's a book that's actually looking at Gen Z and Gen Alpha, so kind of everybody born since 2000, and how they use digital media and how it's different from the way that older generations, like me, how they use it and what that means for our society. And I am actually extremely optimistic about the power and the ability to create their own life path that these tools give to these generations.

And I'm still quite disappointed because the general talk about, you know, that generation and digital media is still very negative. It's still very, well, it caused a lot of anxiety and loneliness and depression, and that's bad. Well, actually, so, and without wanting to minimize that, what I and my co-author, Catherine Henry, what we found is that, well, yes, that a lot of that actually is down to the COVID experience. 

There is stuff there that needs to be addressed, but we also see massive amounts of empowerment and connection with other people in other places, especially if you're somebody who, well, just being able to be completely global. These generations are completely global in a way that older generations can't, still probably can't even truly imagine. And so, yeah, that's all super positive.

Fred Schonenberg

Yeah, super interesting. I remember years ago going to an augmented reality sort of demonstration where it was Bose, the speaker company.

Leslie Shannon

Exactly. Those are great. The Bose glasses.

Fred Schonenberg

And I remember being like, I was like, these are super cool. And it was like directional audio, right? It was like, hey, turn left five feet ahead. And I was like, oh, this is so lovely. I don't have to wear something weird. I look like myself and I'm not squinting to figure out what little tiny graphic is over here. It's actually super helpful. It's like a GPS type of thing and then they have like a golf application or something.

Leslie Shannon

Right, right.

Fred Schonenberg

And I was like, this is pretty cool. This makes more sense to me as a consumer. So it's interesting to see that come to light. So let me get you out of here on this. What are you most excited about? One of the phrases I mentioned the what's next now is like something VentureFuel says a lot. But it comes from when I launched the company. It was because I had a lot of large clients that kept saying, what's next? And it was like this insatiable thirst for it. What's the growth area? Or what's the thing coming down the road? I'm curious, from your perspective, are there things that you see coming that you're really excited about? That you're like, hey, watch this space or this technology or this type of startup because there's something here.

Leslie Shannon

Yeah. The number one right now that I'm really looking at is a thing called AI-RAN. So that's a telco thing. RAN stands for radio access network. It's a telco term for just mobile connectivity. And so we, Nokia, we're working with NVIDIA right now to look at putting their GPUs into base stations, which are one mobile hop away from your phone or from some other kind of end device.

And this is actually where, as I was speaking earlier, where the computing could possibly sit in the network to enable things like lighter, cheaper end devices like, say, AR glasses. Because the only way we have AR glasses that can really be assistants that are understanding our context around us in a way that we're actually going to wear them and use them, as you were describing with the Bose glasses, is if the computing comes off the glasses. Because then they can be light enough to be fashionable. They don't cost so much. The battery lasts much longer. They don't heat up.

But if you put the computing too far away, and smartphones aren't big enough, by the way. Now that generative AI is in the picture, smartphones can do some of it, but they can't do all of it, especially processing video. That's a big lift. Smartphones can't do it. But if it's just one hop away, now we're actually starting to enable all kinds of things. So at the very beginning of that, with the idea of what's called split rendering or split processing, where some, a little bit is done locally and a little bit is done there. Yeah, but not deep, deep, deep in the network, but just right there so you can still maybe hold on to your own data, also for safety and privacy.

Fred Schonenberg

Yeah.

Leslie Shannon

Now, it's very, very early days. Our project with NVIDIA and T-Mobile, and also Ericsson, has just begun. So this is something that will be coming up and developing really over the next decade. But anytime you see AI-RAN, that means enablement of all kinds of end-user devices to become more affordable with longer battery life and all that kind of stuff. That's what you should think when you hear that. Don't just go, oh, boring infrastructure thing.

Fred Schonenberg

Yeah. I love it.

Leslie Shannon

Massive enablement for new devices. That's what we're all about here.

Fred Schonenberg

Leslie, you literally never disappoint. You throw something out there that I haven't thought about. And I've been reading about sort of the edge computing versus on the network and how's that going to go. This is a very interesting sort of the split of the processing to have some there that's close. You could have some back somewhere far away, right? And then you have some right on the device. That enables all that personalization and speed and all the things you just mentioned.

Leslie Shannon

Exactly. I mean, you said edge computing. That's exactly what it is. We've been talking about this for a decade and a half. Now we're actually building it, finally.

Fred Schonenberg

I love it. Well, Leslie, let me thank you for taking the time to share with us. I love that you mentioned Denmark. Our last dinner, we talked passionately about Denmark and happiness. I was trying to remember.

Leslie Shannon

Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

Fred Schonenberg

That’s a big combo. But thank you for everything you're doing to spark change and for making the time to share with our audience.

Leslie Shannon

Fred, it's always a pleasure. You and VentureFuel do fabulous work, and I'm just happy to help pour a little oil on your own ball bearings if I can. That's a really terrible metaphor.

Fred Schonenberg

Well, I think the audience knows what you meant. So that was great. Well, thank you so much for everything.

Leslie Shannon

You're welcome.

Fred Schonenberg

See you soon.