AI and Traditional Telecom Infrastructure Create Different Demands: Verizon

of workloads, so to build the infrastructure to support them doesn’t necessarily require an integration between the two workloads,” she said. Another question for providers is the extent they’re going to rely on a third-party cloud provider to handle workloads that are “highly compute intense and storage intense.” These are “early days” for AI and networking and each carrier must work through problems itself, she said. “It would be great if there was more consensus, but I don’t think there is yet.” Fernando Castro Cristin, vice president-telco infrastructure at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said companies want AI to reduce costs and optimize their business and generate revenue. “The telecom industry is there to connect all that together,” he said, adding carriers already are using AI to optimize parts of their networks. “We’ve been optimizing networks for decades, not using AI,” Cohen said. “It’ll be interesting to see how much AI can optimize further.” There’s also a push for carriers to open networks so they can offer customers AI-based applications. “That is very much more exciting and a newer approach to using AI and using the infrastructure to support it,” Cohen said. That’s also much more complicated and puts additional pressure on providers to protect customers’ data, she added. Cristin predicted security will become more important than it is today.