The U.K. arm of Cellnex saw its in-country CEO role removed as the tower giant continues its Northern European consolidation.

Gianluca Landolina stepped down after two and a half years in the CEO chair, with Steve Cray promoted to managing director for Cellnex’s British operations.

With Cray providing local leadership, Nuno Carvalhosa oversees the U.K. in his role as CEO for Northern Europe, encompassing the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland.

Landolina, meanwhile, will become CEO of the new Vertical Solutions unit, which he has headed since February alongside the U.K. position. That same month saw Cellnex reorganize its European operations into four clusters, including Northern Europe, Iberia, an "Alpine" region encompassing Italy and Switzerland, and France as the sole standalone.

Commenting on his move, Landolina wrote on LinkedIn: “Thank you to our Group CEO Marco Patuano for the trust and for offering me this exciting opportunity. I’m truly grateful and energized by the challenge ahead. A huge thank you to the entire U.K. management team and all my colleagues across the United Kingdom. … Working alongside such talented, passionate, and committed people has been a privilege, and I’m extremely proud of what we have achieved together.”

On his new role, Cray commented: "It is an honor to take on the role of managing director at such a significant moment for U.K. infrastructure. … The U.K.'s AI ambitions are real and achievable, and I look forward to working with our teams, our customers, and the wider industry to ensure the U.K. leads in connectivity.”

Cray and the way of AI

Cray’s ascension at Cellnex has been a quick one, having only started in September as its customer and technical operations director. Prior to Cellnex, Cray spent almost 24 years at Ericsson in various roles, broken up by a governance stint at broadcasters Red Bee Media.

At Ericsson, Cray served in top dog positions as its U.K. and Ireland head of network and managed service delivery, as well as its head of governance and transformation prior to joining Red Bee in 2017.

At this month’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Cray, wearing his then-hat of customer/tech ops director, discussed the AI potential with SDxCentral.

“We've got about 600 access requests per day that we're managing to facilitate work, that either we're doing or other people are doing on those sites that are there," Cray said. "So you can start to see now the buildup of data that you get with that and the ability to actually use AI tools to be able to better manage across that."

Cray added Cellnex uses centralized network operation centers to aggregate data from both small cells and macro sites and apply AI-driven models for predictive maintenance.

“What everybody wants to do is to reduce the number of times you have to send an engineer to site," Cray explained. "And actually the most successful way to be able to do that is to be able to use models based on data, using AI wherever you can, to be able to actually work out more predictive routines, to be able to address things through routine maintenance.”