Justin Reilly on AI, Event-Driven Architecture & the Future of Telecom
At DTW 2026, Wavelo CEO Justin Reilly joined Telco Titans' Matt Leary for a wide-ranging conversation about how he became "AI first" more than a decade before it was a buzzword, why the industry's real bottleneck lives deep in the plumbing of telecom, and what it will take for operators to move AI from proof-of-concept to production. Watch the full interview above — here are a few of the ideas that stood out.
An AI-first mindset, long before the acronym
Justin traces his path from a college basketball career cut short by injury to the intersection of software and infrastructure, through a string of companies built around "digital product," "big data," and eventually AI. What stuck with him across all of it was the systems-of-record problem, the same one that plagues both healthcare's EMRs and telecom's billing stacks. These systems were built 30 or 40 years ago to do one simple thing (charge for minutes and texts), and we've spent decades asking them to do far more than they were ever designed for.
Why Wavelo is having an event-driven moment
Wavelo was built to tackle that core problem in a modern way: event-driven, headless, and with AI at the forefront. Justin explains how the thesis was battle-tested inside Tucows' own MVNO and fiber businesses before scaling through partners like EchoStar's Boost Mobile — migrating subscribers off 20- and 30-year-old Sprint systems in the process. Event-driven architecture, he notes, is the same foundation that underpins Uber and Airbnb, and it's the right bet for telecoms thinking about the next 30 years rather than the last 30.
The investor pressure reshaping telecom
With suppressed multiples and capital shifting toward data centers and AI infrastructure, investors want returns sooner, better EBITDA, healthier ARPU, and serious churn mitigation. Justin sees this creating a "burning platform" for operators facing deeper fiber competition and a push toward convergence across mobile, fiber, and streaming. Increasingly, private equity and holdco owners are asking Wavelo to consolidate portfolio companies stuck on seven different CRMs — and, for the first time, doing acquisitions with software synergies in mind.
A safety layer for the agentic era
Perhaps the most forward-looking thread: because Wavelo is event-driven and headless, it naturally acts as a control plane and safety layer for operators building agentic AI on top. Justin recalls how, in the last AI wave, chatbots couldn't be trusted to touch the billing system — so every meaningful customer conversation had to hand off to a human. Solve the core system-of-record problem, and operators can "run wild" with AI while trusting the rails to keep things from going haywire.
The takeaway from Copenhagen
Justin leaves DTW with a sharpened sense of responsibility. The gap between AI proof-of-concept and real deployment is wider than he expected, and he wants Wavelo to help close it through more content, a more consultative approach, and sharing the real examples the team has dogfooded internally, alongside partners like TM Forum working to bring event-driven thinking into industry frameworks.
Watch the full conversation above.
