Difficult times for operators call for questioning old orthodoxies to win. For the better part of a decade, telecom companies have suffered through declining revenues, cash flow, and return on investment just as tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have mushroomed by building their businesses on the operators' own infrastructure. While these tech visionaries have enjoyed well over $1 trillion in combined market-cap growth by innovating and thinking differently and adeptly, telecom companies have tried to compete by implementing the same old survival tactics: cutting costs, reducing the workforce, and timidly entering into new business adjacencies. The trouble is that playbook no longer applies. It's time the telecom companies embrace this new reality and rethink the key orthodoxies that have shaped their industry since the first phone call was made about 140 years ago. If not, the alternative is dire.

Participants and startups in the emerging self-driving vehicles industry (components, systems, trucks, cars and buses) have been at it for over almost 60 years. The pace accelerated in 2004, 2005 and 2007 when DARPA sponsored long-distance competitions for driverless cars, and then again in 2009 when Uber began its ride-hailing system. As the prospects that self-driving ride-hailing fleets, vehicles, systems and associated AI would soon be a reality, startups, fundings, mergers and acquisitions have followed reaching a peak in 2017. Thus far in 2017 more than 55 companies and startups offering everything from solid state distancing sensors to ride-share fleets and mapping systems – plus five strategic acquisitions – raised over $28.2 billion! Listed below are month-by-month recaps of self-driving-related fundings and acquisitions as reported by The Robot Report.

Associate professor Tarek Taha will use the three-year, $44,000 award from the National Science Foundation to work toward his goal of developing an artificial intelligence chip. Taha says the chip will be more efficient and compact than current ones.

In Intel's financial third quarter reported Thursday, the chip giant made $16.1 billion in revenue on earnings of 94 cents per share, beating Wall Street estimates of $15.73 billion in revenue on earnings of 80 cents per share. The PC market continues to be a challenge for Intel. Growth in the company's PC unit was flat over the previous year with $8.9 billion in sales for the quarter. In addition to a slowing market, Intel faces a more competitive Advanced Micro Devices, which just launched its latest chips for laptop computers on Thursday. "We have earnings growth in a market with increasing competition," pointed out Intel CFO Bob Swan in an interview.

US auto retailer AutoNation Inc announced a multi-year partnership on Thursday to support Alphabet Inc's Waymo self-driving car unit, including vehicle maintenance and repairs as the company adds new brands into its fleet, sending its shares up 13 percent to a high for the year. That news was accompanied by a better-than expected third-quarter profit as AutoNation performed well despite the impact of hurricanes during the quarter. There is fierce competition between large automakers to bring self-driving cars to market first. Lauderdale, Florida-based AutoNation is the latest in a series of recent partnerships the self-driving unit has formed. Google has revealed the self driving minivans it hopes could revolutionize the way we travel.

Mapbox, a Washington, DC and San Francisco provider of nav systems for car companies and others involved in autonomous vehicles, raised $164 million in a Series C round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from existing investors including Foundry Group, DFJ Growth, DBL Partners, and Thrive Capital. "Location data is central and mission critical to the development of the world's most exciting technologies," said Rajeev Misra, who helps oversee SoftBank's Vision Fund. Element AI, a Canadian startup providing learning platform solutions for self-driving and advanced manufacturing, raised $135 CAD million (around $105 million) in a Series A round (in June) led by Data Collective, a SV-based venture capital firm, and included participation by Fidelity Investments Canada, National Bank of Canada, Intel Capital, and Real Ventures. Ninebot, the Chinese consumer products company that bought out Segway and raised $80 million in 2015, raised another $100 million in a Series C round from the SDIC Fund Management Co. and the China Mobile Fund. Horizon Robotics, another Chinese startup, raised $100 million in a Series A round led by Intel Capital with participation by Wu Capital, Morningside Venture Capital, Linear Venture, Hillhouse Capital and Harvest Investments.

Research analysts are the most likely employees on Wall Street to find themselves working with--or being replaced by--robots, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates. By next year, some 75% of banks and financial firms will either explore or implement artificial intelligence technologies, harnessing a variety of digital services to extract insights from mountains of data. While AI is probably near the peak of its hype cycle, several factors have helped it gain traction in recent years, according to Greenwich. Billions of images and documents are now available online for training computers to spot patterns and other high-level tasks. Advances in graphical processing units, which are adept at the kind of data crunching required by AI, are making sifting through daunting datasets much easier.

SAN, FRANCISCO/SEOUL – As of early fall, it was clearer than ever that production problems meant Apple Inc. wouldn't have enough iPhone Xs in time for the holidays. The challenge was how to make the sophisticated phone -- with advanced features such as facial recognition -- in large enough numbers. As Wall Street analysts and fan blogs watched for signs that the company would stumble, Apple came up with a solution: It quietly told suppliers they could reduce the accuracy of the face-recognition technology to make it easier to manufacture, according to people familiar with the situation. With the iPhone X set to debut on Nov. 3, we're about to find out whether the move has paid off. Some analysts say there may still be too few iPhone Xs to meet initial demand.

Investors and analysts have been expecting Ant to go public sometime in 2018. The Hangzhou-based company last raised $4.5 billion from private investors in April 2016 in a deal that gave it a $60 billion valuation--and its business has since expanded significantly. An IPO "is not a necessity or a priority" right now, said Douglas Feagin, Ant's president of international business, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. Mr. Feagin, an American who was a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker for more than two decades, said he can appreciate the benefits of going public but Ant has other, more pressing, plans to implement. Among Ant's pursuits: expanding Alipay's global footprint within and beyond the 70 countries the payments system is used in, while plumbing for new technology investments globally in things like facial-recognition and machine-learning systems.

Intel Corp. reported strong revenue growth during its third quarter as its "data-centric" strategy begins to take hold in key technology sectors like all-flash storage. Meanwhile, it is readying a new AI chip. Intel was among several leading U.S. technology companies reporting strong revenues this week along with Amazon and Google. The chipmaker reported revenue totaling $16.1 billion for its third quarter, about $400 million higher than forecast. Intel said it is revising its annual revenue forecast up by $700 million to $62 billion.