In this live episode of The Bridgecast, recorded at the Bridgepoint Tech Summit 2025, host Scott Kinka welcomes Chad Townes, Senior Vice President of AT&T Partner Solutions, for an in-depth exploration of enterprise connectivity, AI-driven networking, and the infrastructure powering tomorrow's business landscape.

With over 30 years of experience spanning wholesale, consumer, business, and operations divisions at AT&T, Chad brings a rare perspective on how massive organizations evolve while maintaining focus on customer needs. His career arc—from wholesale to consumer to operations to partnerships—reveals a counterintuitive truth: the best leaders aren't specialists; they're perpetual learners driven by curiosity.

Chad Townes is the Senior Vice President of AT&T Partner Solutions, bringing three decades of hands-on experience across AT&T's wholesale, consumer, business, and operations divisions. He's led teams deploying wireless networks in stadiums and convention centers at the dawn of the iPhone era, managed global customer delivery operations, and now oversees the partnership ecosystem that connects AT&T's scale to customers everywhere. His leadership philosophy centers on curiosity, cross-functional empathy, and the belief that organizations thrive when people understand not just their own role but how the entire system works together.

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Chad explains why asking "why" repeatedly is the most powerful leadership tool in his arsenal. When you ask someone why and they can't tell you, it opens the door to do things differently and better. More importantly, it creates psychological safety—people know they can share opinions without criticism. This technique was so powerful that even when Chad felt confident in his knowledge, he continued to use the "why" question because it drove collaboration and saved "time, energy, and money in all the deployments we did." After 30 years at AT&T working in wholesale, consumer, business, and operations, Chad reveals his secret: "I feel like I'm a little bit of a unicorn at times because I've been deep in the weeds on the technology side, but I also feel like I can go talk to a customer just like they're my best friend at any time." This balance—knowing the technology deeply while understanding customer needs intimately—is what made the transition to partnerships natural rather than jarring.

Connectivity has transitioned from a commodity utility to a strategic asset. As Chad puts it: "It's air. You don't know until you don't have it." With AI-driven demand for massive data throughput and latency requirements, network architecture is no longer about "good enough"—it's about competitive advantage. AT&T is investing hundreds of millions into fiber and spectrum infrastructure for AI-driven demand, but the use cases are still emerging. "We don't even know what we need because we're constantly adding all this stuff. With AI, the amount of data being consumed, the payloads, the requirements for latency—there are things we're building into the network today that most people don't even know they need. But they need it."

FirstNet is more than a network upgrade—it's a dedicated emergency response infrastructure with reserved spectrum for first responders (fire, police, military, and medical). But the innovation didn't stop there. AT&T developed satellite trucks on wheels, drones that broadcast spectrum, and mobile units that follow first responders into disaster zones. When hurricanes destroy networks, AT&T is already there rebuilding in real-time. "We're parked on the edge waiting for it to happen so we can immediately fill the gaps." Leading multiple teams through macro-level disruption requires one thing: relentless customer focus. "What does the customer need?" That customer could be shareholders, actual customers, internal teams, or the network itself. Then, build custom metrics for each group so they understand how their work lends to the collective goal. "One mission isn't one mission; it's a thousand little missions that the leader can then tie all together."