The United States Navy is reportedly expanding their ocean combat network, known as the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES), to seamlessly connect their ships, submarines, and on-shore locations using artificial intelligence (AI). The hope is that CANES will reduce the number of sailors required to maintain operations, thus potentially saving the Navy billions of dollars over years of use. By 2020, the Navy hopes to deploy CANES on 190 vessels and Maritime Operations Centers. "We are very interested in artificial intelligence being able to help us better than it is today," Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett, Navy Cyber Security Division Director, told Warrior. "We want to trust a machine and also look at AI in terms of how we use it against adversaries."

As it has more than 12,500 patents, eight Nobel prizes, and a 140-year history of field-testing crazy ideas, it should surprise no one that AT&T would be an important player in artificial intelligence. "AT&T is a backbone of the internet," explains Nadia Morris, head of Innovation at the AT&T Connected Health Foundry. The company manages wireless, landline, and even private secure networks to power connectivity for both individuals and corporations. All these networks generate incredible volumes of data that is ripe for machine analysis. AT&T has built AI and machine learning systems for decades, using algorithms to automate operations such as common call center procedures and the analysis and correction of network outages.

With more than 12,500 patents, eight Nobel prizes, and a 140 year history of field-testing crazy ideas, no one should be surprised that AT&T would be an important player in artificial intelligence. "AT&T is a backbone of the internet," explains Nadia Morris, Head of Innovation at the AT&T Connected Health Foundry. The company manages wireless, landline, and even private secure networks to power connectivity for both individuals and corporations. All these networks generate incredible volumes of data ripe for machine analysis. AT&T has built AI and machine learning systems for decades, using algorithms to automate operations such as common call center procedures and the analysis and correction of network outages.

Much of the artificial intelligence talk at Mobile World Congress is at the device level -- services based on voice recognition, in particular. But AI has a role deeper in the infrastructure, of course, and Ericsson touched on that to kick off the conference Monday morning. In Ericsson's traditional MWC opener for press and analysts, Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm understandably focused on 5G. But AI and machine learning were the second topic of his overview, an indication of how deeply Ericsson expects these technologies to change the network. Nokia is in the process of acquiring Deepfield, a deep learning startup, to help with traffic flows in software-defined networking (SDN).