In this episode of The Winner’s Circle , Russ Fordyce sits down with Joshua Turiano, SVP of AI at BlueStream Fiber, to talk about how the company turned AI from a buzzword into a practical operating advantage. As a 2026 BIG Innovation Award winner, BlueStream Fiber is being recognized not just for the tech itself, but for a team-first approach that focuses on helping people work faster, smarter, and with better context.
Joshua shares how BlueStream connected structured operational data to AI so call center agents, support reps, and field teams could get faster answers without bouncing between dozens of systems. He walks through the company’s internal tools like the “Support Guru,” how they reduced troubleshooting time, and why their philosophy was simple: don’t replace the person, replace the task. He also gets into governance, adoption challenges, prompt training, and what it really takes to move from AI curiosity to measurable business impact.
This conversation is a smart look at what happens when AI is built around real workflows instead of shiny-object syndrome. It is especially useful for leaders in telecom, customer experience, operations, and any business trying to make AI useful in the messy real world where the spreadsheets squeak and the dashboards breed in the dark.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome to The Winner’s Circle and introduction to Joshua Turiano of BlueStream Fiber
00:40 What BlueStream Fiber does and the markets it serves
01:47 How the AI journey started inside BlueStream
03:54 From dashboard overload to a smarter AI interface
05:00 “Don’t replace the person, replace the task”
07:20 How AI helped reduce troubleshooting time
09:12 Narrowing 86 AI ideas down to the highest impact projects
09:50 Building triage tools and automating work order review
12:12 How BlueStream prioritized AI use cases across departments
14:40 Why structured data matters and how they reduced hallucinations
16:25 Governance, trust, and building internal AI policy
19:08 From six internal GPTs to broad employee co-creation
20:58 The KPIs that matter for AI in operations
22:39 Testing AI in customer-facing call flows
24:36 Why today’s AI still needs clear prompting
26:17 Lessons learned from field tech adoption and change management
28:52 What adoption really looks like in the real world
Enjoy this episode of The Winner’s Circle and subscribe for more conversations with innovators, operators, and award-winning teams shaping what’s next.
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