Val, Aparna, welcome. Aparna, to you first.
Let's focus on small and mid-sized businesses.
Where are they at when it comes to digital? You know, when you
talk about small and medium businesses, you're talking 99%
of the US businesses, 46% of the workforce, and almost the same
amount of the economy running on small and medium businesses.
So you're talking of all different sizes.
And the one thing that's absolutely clear is a tech-first
story for each one of the them to differentiate and, at the
same time, make sure that they've got the cost
efficiencies done right. For them,
digital comes in—and I try to split it so it's just easier—
it's the four Cs. You're talking about connectivity, of course
I'm Verizon, so I have to talk about that.
But it's the fabric. Connectivity for your base as
well as for all your devices and people.
Then you're talking about cybersecurity, a huge deal for
the small and medium businesses, especially because 95% of the
actors are after the money.
The next one is all about collaboration.
So how do you communicate with your customers?
How do you communicate with each other?
So a huge deal.
And last but not the least, it's about the cloud solutions.
So there's an app for that, as they say, right?
So all those solutions, that's really what small and medium
businesses need to be thinking about—the four Cs. And what help
then, Val, do they need on that digital journey?
Well, it's interesting.
We've been doing a lot of GenAI
work with some of the small and medium-sized businesses, and
what we see coming out from them is they want to use this moment,
this digital transformation, to leapfrog their slower, bigger
rivals.
So what they're looking for is, how can GenAI
help me take some of the service work that perhaps potentially
was a cost before and create sales out of that.
So they're looking to leapfrog, bring in the best technology
that they can and really make the most of the moment that
they're in now.
How can larger companies cater to the needs of the smaller
ones?
You know, for that, it's worth thinking about what it is that
these small and medium businesses need.
Obviously, they don't have as much of a deep pocket.
Obviously, what they need is the wherewithal to know even to go
to the right places.
So, really, the way we think about it is, the large companies
then can give them a one-stop shop for their solution needs or
at least help them access those.
The second piece is about finding them where they are.
A lot of these small businesses—you're talking about
the lawn mowing company, you're talking about the hairdresser,
or then the AI company that's starting up—
they want to connect with you in their own terms.
So it could be local, it could be digital, it could be a call.
So we've got to make sure we're accessible.
The third piece is, and Verizon does this in a nice way through
our Verizon small-and-medium business-ready platform, is
giving them the networking access to a lot of courses, to a
lot of talent, to a lot of mentorship.
How do you open a small business?
What does it mean to scale?
And last but not the least, small businesses, like I said,
come in all shapes and sizes.
They want to be treated with what I call as the
segment-of-one mentality.
That's really important for them.
Yeah.
And building on the segment-of-one point, I would
add two things.
One, they want the best-of-breed solution that works for them.
They don't want to bring a general problem statement and
then customize it.
They want something that's ready to go out of the box.
So best of breed.
And then the second is managed service.
They don't have large IT departments with which they can
oversee the technology.
They want you, as a provider, to take away all that pain and just
make it focused on the value that it's creating for them.
Really being their digital champion.
Very good.
Aparna, Val, thank you so much.
Thank you.