Interview with Phil Skipper, Head of Business Development at Vodafone IoT: “We can connect anything anywhere… but that’s nothing compared to what AI is going to do”

Phil Skipper is one of the many people that I entirely failed to catch up with at MWC 2026, but it shows our joint levels of determination that we finally caught up over Teams in late May. Why so keen? Because Phil is the driving force behind Vodafone IoT, and this is a business that’s exploding. I wanted to find out why.

In particular, what is it about the Internet of Things – an area of technology that has been criticised for its security controls – that means organisations in Europe and beyond are integrating it into their day-to-day business.

We started out with some basics, so feel free to jump ahead, but when it comes to IoT in a business setting I wanted a clear definition.

When Vodafone talks about IoT, what applications use cases are you focusing on?

IoT is relevant for almost any industry you can think about. One real driver for us at Vodafone IoT is automotive. All the cars that are coming out now have SIM cards in them, so you can do emergency call and stream media to them, and so on.

Then, of course, there’s the whole energy and smart grid. So smart metering, water metering, leakage detection, and so on.

We have a very big business in connected healthcare, which is growing very, very strongly indeed. So, this includes devices for things like sleep apnea, pacemakers, and so on.

And then you’ve got all of the applications that come around location and tracking, so that’s fleet management, and then medical supplies, and food, and all of those sorts of things.

So there’s a wide range of applications, but there’s also a very long tail of IoT. It goes down from tens of millions of connected cars through to people wanting to buy five or six SIM cards for five pieces of manufacturing plant they have on their site.

It’s an incredibly broad array, but the one thing that links it all together is all of these companies are digitising their businesses around IoT, and that’s really what’s driving the growth in the market, and the growth of Vodafone IoT.

Can you give one recent example of an organisation that you’ve worked with?

One good recent example is from Spain, where the little emergency triangle [in cars] is being replaced by an emergency beacon. So every car in Spain will have an emergency beacon.

All of those beacons are connected by IoT connectivity, so if you break down, you pop it on your roof, and that immediately tells the traffic control centre that there’s a breakdown.

That’s a really good example of a use case that’s come from nowhere.

And what about a mid-sized company?

There’s a public use case for a small company called LeakSafe. For instance, they have a device which goes onto your mains water. When it detects that there’s flow when there shouldn’t be flow, it cuts off the water, assuming there’s a leak.

LeakSafe have now connected all of those devices up, and that gives them two things: one is much faster recognition of problems, but it also enables all of their customers to have direct access to all of these signals from their smartphone app, right?

That’s a good example of somebody that had an unconnected solution, but is now basing their entire business around connected.

Other good examples: if you’re renting equipment, if you’re a builder’s merchant, and you’re renting out cement mixers and diggers, and all the rest of it, you can now actually put a device on the equipment, and that device will tell you how much use it’s had, so you can actually bill people correctly.

You also know where the device is, and if that device gets stolen from site, of course, you can track it. So there’s another business which has high value assets, which are now protected, and it means they can not only automate their entire business, but also provide better services and more security.

A lot of companies may be thinking, “I do not want to pay for yet another subscription service”. Is there a saving here for people to justify the outlay to you? And what kind of cost should they expect to pay you?

It depends on how you actually want to use it, but a good example is something like preventative maintenance.

If you have a heat pump or something like that, you used to have it regularly checked, so somebody had to go come around, or they used to wait for phone calls. Now, of course, by having it connected, you not only know where all your devices are, but how well they’re performing, so you can really optimise things like maintenance schedules, you can optimise truck rolls, you can take out a whole load of cost.

A great example is the rat trap. You have to go and look at those to make sure there’s not a dead rat in it. If it’s connected, you only actually go and look at the ones which have been triggered.

So there’s a whole variety of that sort of efficiency that comes with IoT. So the value that we see is twofold, one is it delivers a far better customer service and generates more service revenue for the customer, so they can do more things that have never been able to do before.

But on the other hand, it also significantly reduces their operational costs, and depending where it is, it’s typically 25, 30, 40% of operational costs you can take out, which clearly pays for IoT. If it didn’t, we probably wouldn’t connect over 240 million things.

So let’s say I’m Rentokil, or a fictitious version of Rentokil. How much am I going to be paying for a monthly subscription to Vodafone IoT for that embedded beacon inside?

We’re not going to give out our pricing, but I’ll give you an example. There is a company that’s based in Germany, they basically charge about a euro a year [per device]. So this is not going to be a 20, 30 pounds a year per device. This is significantly more attractive, and there’s quite a strong relationship between the value of the asset and the sort of value of connectivity, but it’s going to be that sort of order of magnitude.

How has the world of business IoT changed since you joined Vodafone in 2013?

Over the past ten years the market has massively matured. We no longer get questions about will IoT work, the questions we get is “How do I digitise my business around IoT?” So the concerns about whether IoT is the right thing to do, is sort of completely gone.

We’ve also now seen a much broader range of connectivity options, from satellites right the way down to these specialist low power wide area networks, so we’re now able to have the best connection for everyone’s application.

For example, where you want a CCTV camera that streams massive amounts of data, you can now put it on 4G and 5G. If you want a connected rat trap, it goes onto NB-IoT, and there’s such a range of different options in between.

So I think it’s true to say that over the last ten years the market has massively matured, the technology is incredibly stable, but more importantly it’s ubiquitous. That’s one of the great benefits of using cellular, that if you’re a manufacturer in Aberdeen, you can make a product and operate it in Azerbaijan in exactly the same way.

We’ve got 760 available networks in about 180 countries. They cover 5G, 4G, still a bit of 2G, LPWA. We can connect anything anywhere, but more importantly, in the most appropriate way for the customer’s application. But that’s nothing compared to what AI is going to do.

Okay, let’s talk AI: What is it going to do to IoT?

Currently, in the vast majority of our business, we tell you where something is and what status it’s in. Now, with AI and IoT, and I think the term “AIoT” is going to become increasingly more relevant, you can do things that you’ve never been able to do before.

Especially with the advent of vision systems, low-cost vision, you start to get IoT sensors that can detect more than one thing. Today, we have a sensor, and it detects distance. If you’ve got a camera, it can detect distance, colour, shape, speed, a whole range of different attributes, and I think that’s the real value that’s going to come from AI.

The other thing about AI is the internal changes [at Vodafone IoT]. So if you’re operating millions of devices, you want to automate that as much as you possibly can. Not only do we have to automate it, you also have to orchestrate it, because even though we’ve got 760 available networks, we only own 20 of them.

So we then need to be able to orchestrate how things connect in different countries at different times for different applications, and that’s ideally set for AI. So we’re already doing a lot of AI in terms of our network automation and our platform automation, that will only continue.

Again, it’s a two function thing. AI is going to generate a load more use cases, but also enable us to operate every use case much more efficiently.

Can you give me the best implementation you’ve yet seen of automation/AIoT for one of your customers?

I would look at something like chaotic IoT – where you’re taking chaos and you’re moving it into order, and we call that chaotic IoT. For example, if you’ve got a returns clothing line, you don’t know what the next thing coming down the conveyor is going to be. If you have an IoT camera looking at it, with AI, it can recognise what it actually is and route it sufficiently.

Recycling is another really good example. This idea of chaotic IoT, I think, is going to be one of the real advances you see in IoT, and you see it already with simple cases like CCTV cameras being able to identify when there’s people intrusion, when it’s spiders, when it’s whatever, these are all the things that AI will just make better and better over the coming years.

You mean like those security services advertised on TV that promise to intervene when a burglar is detected?

Well, let me give you a good example. We have a company called Vodafone Automotive, and they operate a stolen vehicle tracking system. When you go out in your car, you have a token that you carry with you, and that says that the driver is in the car with the token.

If the car starts moving without the token, the system automatically phones you. So you actually have an AI chatbot that calls you up and says, “We just noticed that your car started moving without the token in it.” Most of the time the driver forgot the token, but that’s a really good example of automating a system. Previously, someone had to call the person to find out.

We’re also now doing clever things, like we’re encouraging people to park their vehicles in locations where it’s safer. So you can say, look, we know this area. If you want to park, put the car over here,. So we already use [AI] to take out a lot of the wasted work that comes from many of these processes, and that gives a far, far better customer experience.

Talking of security, that’s something people worry about when it comes to IoT, particularly for older devices. How is Vodafone helping here?

Yes, we have a process of making sure that we are secure by design. This has always been our philosophy. But what’s more important is that within AI we don’t make security an option. You can’t decide whether you want to buy security or not, you get it as part of our managed service.

That takes 2G devices, which were some of our first devices, all the way through to the 4G and 5G Standalone. One of the great benefits of what we do, of course, is everything is secured by SIM card, and that creates a root of trust within the cellular network, and it’s the same thing that you use for your mobile phone. So, inherently, it’s very secure.

Then, of course, we operate in a very regulated market, so there’s GDPR, there’s know your customer, there’s a whole range of other things that we have to comply with. Not only that, we have to comply with them in the various regulatory environments in which we operate, so security is absolutely key.

Coming down the line, of course, you’ve got quantum computing, and one of the challenges of quantum technology is it becomes quite adept at breaking encryption. We are already putting quantum VPN into our devices, so even though the sort of encryption we use today won’t be broken for a number of years, we’re already pre-populating our devices with quantum-safe technology today, because we know that our devices will be in the field for 10, 15, perhaps 20 years. You’ve got to be ahead of the game.

Security is something that we take very seriously, both as Vodafone and as Vodafone IoT, and we are blessed by having a secure infrastructure based on the cellular network, which is consistent across the world, as our starting point.

You mentioned satellites earlier. Is that a growing market for Vodafone IoT with the rise of Starlink and other low-earth orbit satellites? What’s the opportunity here for businesses?

Everyone talks about ubiquity in terms of network categories. If you’re operating a satellite network, you actually start to have global connectivity.

Now, what most customers want is a connection everywhere. There are some places where the cellular network doesn’t reach, so satellite suddenly provides a very good way of connecting those devices up.

It’s really good for filling in holes in the network for things like the emergency call in your car that has to work 100% of the time, so if you’re in the Outer Hebrides or something like that, being able to jump to satellite is really quite helpful.

For us, the concept of satellite gives us complete coverage. Not just what we call high connectivity, we call it hyper connectivity – so the fact that you can connect literally anything anywhere at any time, irrespective of whether it’s in an urban area or in a really remote area or on the middle of the sea, so it’s just another tool to make sure that this device is connected everywhere.

The trick of IoT is if you put out 100 devices, you want 100 to work. There’s no point in having 99 of them work, and you still having to maintain one. So, this idea of combining terrestrial and satellite technology is going to be a key feature of IoT going forwards.

Finally, I’ll give you the chance of the big sell. What’s so great about Vodafone IoT compared to everyone else?

Well, one, we’ve been the recognised leader for the last 12 years, so we know what we’re doing. We can execute on small scale and very big scale. We operate globally, so if you’re a global OEM, you can connect your cameras around the world. It doesn’t actually matter [where].

And then I think we’ve actually got the resources, the experience, and the capability to invest going forwards, and I think what you’re seeing is there’s going to be a dramatic acceleration in IoT, particularly driven by AI, and you need to work with organisations that have the scale to continue to innovate and push IoT forwards.

I think that’s the attribute that Vodafone brings. So we can connect anything anywhere, but we can also continue to invest to make sure that everything remains connected in the most efficient way, so that’s how we see the world. And also you get to talk to me, which might be a disadvantage!

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