AT&T Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Great. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the AT&T Fireside Chat at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. My name is Mike Yang, and I cover AT&T and telecom here at Goldman. I have the wonderful privilege of introducing John Stankey, who is the Chairman and CEO of AT&T. First and foremost, thank you so much for being here, John. It is an absolute pleasure.

Well, thanks for having us in, Mike. Maybe before we jump in and get started, if I can point you to our safe harbor statement and remind you that some of the things we are going to talk about today are forward-looking. They may or may not come to pass. If you would like more detailed disclosures, there is some really wonderful reading on the AT&T investor relations website.

Great. To start things off, let us talk about big picture overall strategy. The company has been making investments in the asset base, the build engine, the fiber assets, wireless infrastructure, all in an effort to drive sustainable long-term growth. That growth is underpinned by long-term financial guidance, a double-digit EPS CAGR through 2028, including mid to high single-digit growth in advanced connectivity EBITDA. To start, maybe you can just share with us your strategic priorities and how that translates into the long-term financial outcomes.

Sure. The strategic priorities really have not changed for about five years. We have been pretty deliberately investing top of the industry, and we have been doing that largely to drive the growth you alluded to. Our point of view had been that if we put the right assets in play in our industry, that we could grow at a better rate, and we could ultimately have a better profitability equation. I think you started to see the evidence of that last quarter where that inflection point started to hit. The goal here is to make sure that we are a scaled provider in fiber and we lead in deployment of fiber infrastructure over time, strengthen our already strong wireless business, and carry it forward. In fact, you are seeing that happen and the growth is coming. The products together are a superior offering in the market.

We're able to take share in places where we weren't able to take share before, plus engage and take the benefit of natural growth in the market that's occurring. This is largely coming on the backs of putting two products together from a convergence perspective. That brings us with higher household revenues. It gives us better margin performance as a consolidated account, lowers churn, keeps acquisition costs in check, and that equation is now starting to drive into that guidance that you talked about, which is margins have been stable to improving. You're seeing the service revenue growth. You're seeing the double-digit EPS growth. You're seeing our EBITDA improvement.

We're meeting our expectations on gaining share and service revenues in the industry, and we think that formula is good, and we think it's got some legs because, as you know, we're not done building footprint until the latter part of this decade when we kind of wrap that up, and it takes us 3 to 4 years to penetrate that footprint, and we'll be able to ride that chain all the way up to that time.

Great. It certainly feels like the market has come to acknowledge that convergence is a very effective strategy, and it's working. AT&T really has a fiber-led convergence strategy with plans to reach more than 30 million fiber locations by 2030. Most of your peers talk about convergence through the lens of bundling and customer retention, but AT&T seems to be approaching it a little bit differently with a heavy emphasis on fiber ownership, network integration, and scale. With that said, why are you leaning so heavily into a fiber-led convergence strategy? What advantages does owning and scaling both the fiber and wireless networks create that some of your peers may have a harder time replicating?

Yeah, I think we're in the early innings of convergence and kind of what my expectation will be over the coming years and how we're going to see things play out. I mentioned the near-term benefits just a few moments ago, which is you put an account together on both products and services, and you see churn improvement. You see lifetime value accretion that goes on with that customer. You see brand loyalty improve. All those things can happen by just putting two really good products together that ultimately give the customer some value, and I think that's the first couple of innings of the convergence play. But one of the important parts of it, you're putting really good products together.

Fiber and fiber broadband is a superior product, and that is what drives a lot of the surprise and delight that ultimately gives the customer the better brand point of view, makes the entire bundle stickier, and allows you to, over that lifetime value, grow some accretion and benefit. However, the later innings of conversion are going to start to be more product and feature-led. I'll give you an example. I expect we'll see satellite services bundled in at some point in time in the very near future.

In order to do that, it's not the easiest task to actually manage the layers of a network between satellite, wireless, fixed broadband, Wi-Fi, and to do that right, I think that's where you start to do things to say, look, I can give you a very seamless experience from a service perspective as well as an easy experience from an account relationship billing perspective. When you start to do those things and you're giving somebody always-on connectivity, always working, very consistent, that moves beyond, it's just as people refer to it, a discount. It's not just a discount. It's a product that works better for the customer.

When we look at things like OneConnect that we've put out there, which is to take away the anxiety from a customer to say, "Whatever device you want to connect, you got that iPad that's sitting in a drawer that maybe you haven't had on the network. You want your vehicle to have the ability to stream entertainment in the back. All that's available to you on OneConnect in a very straightforward, simple approach." Those are the things that start to add value in. I think you'll see more and more of that in the, let's call it, the middle innings and the later innings of convergence as we move forward, that are going to move well beyond just an affordable price of putting the products and services together.

Great. We've talked about why you've committed to a fiber-led convergence strategy and some of the advantages of owning both fiber and wireless networks. At the same time, you've made a lot of changes in your go-to-market approach through initiatives such as the refresh unlimited plans, Build-A-Plan, some of the legacy plan retirements, and some targeted pricing actions. How do those initiatives support the convergence opportunity that we just discussed, and what are you looking to achieve with all those things that are out there?

I would go back to the comment I made earlier where our goal is to lead in service revenues. When we think about, especially where we ultimately put fiber infrastructure down, we really do not want to just think about serving the premium end of the market, where we have done very well at AT&T. When you look at our wireless base and you see what happened during the early years of penetration of fiber, premium high-value accounts have been our mainstay and bread and butter. Part of what we have been doing to tweak the plans is if our goal really is to lead in service revenue growth across the industry, then we have got to be applicable to all segments, and we have to be pretty effective in doing that.

When we offer Build-A-Plan, Build-A-Plan came out and went at a place in the value segment that we were not doing particularly well at, and it is a way for us to get into wireless penetration in an under-penetrated segment. Our intent is, okay, what can we add on to that? Certainly in a fiber footprint, we want to put an affordable broadband solution. Maybe it is not our best-performing gigabit service, but a more value-based product that once you put that infrastructure out there and your fixed costs are in place, you will take that value-oriented customer on top of it, and that is accretive to you. The same thing if you are thinking about using valid capacity in your wireless network to add a fixed wireless account onto something.