Mobile World Congress 2018: You Can't Teach an AI to Run a Telecom Network--Yet

In a stifling room at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Chris Reece discussed what artificial intelligence could do for the telecommunications industry. Reece, a technologist for Award Solutions, explained that AI, which telecos have already leveraged in some situations, could help solve some of communications service providers' (CSPs) most complicated problems. CSPs have been slow to adopt artificial intelligence, Reece explained, in part because the initial problems AI was developed to address didn't really affect them. When he asked the crowd for examples of problems they'd heard of AI solving, one person suggested chess, and another mentioned image recognition. Reece agreed, saying, "I don't know a lot of teleco operators who really need a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog." "There's a lot of opportunity to use AI in the telecom space, and we're just starting to scratch the surface," Reece added.