Daniel Faggella is Head of Research at Emerj. Called upon by the United Nations, World Bank, INTERPOL, and leading enterprises, Daniel is a globally sought-after expert on the competitive strategy implications of AI for business and government leaders. Verizon is the second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and the largest by market capitalization. The company is also the largest wireless provider in the United States with a reported 143 million subscriptions. In its 2021 annual report, the company reported revenues of $126.3 billion.

Shankar Arumugavelu is what you might call a Verizon lifer. He was a director at telecom GTE when Bell Atlantic acquired it in 2000 to form Verizon. Today he's SVP and global CIO of Verizon, where he's helping to drive the company's adoption of emerging technologies like AI and machine learning in service of creating competitive advantage and improving customer experience. "As we look at emerging technologies, AI is a big area of focus," Arumugavelu says. "You have disciplines within AI as well, whether it's NLP or computer vision, robotic process automation, cognitive decisioning, etc. We have work going on across every single one of those disciplines to see how we can leverage that to drive a competitive advantage."

Maximizing coverage with the least number of transmitters is a priority, said Shankar Arumugavelu, senior vice president and global chief information officer of Verizon. "When we build out these networks, these are very capital-intensive," he said. "We have to make sure that we are being very judicious in terms of how we are investing our capital." The models, designed by in-house data scientists and other employees, factor in a number of variables that can alter the strength of 5G signals, like buildings, bridges, terrain, the position of the transmitter, as well as other transmitters nearby. Verizon, along with rivals AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc., is racing to build out nationwide 5G service, a yearslong effort slowed by the lack of available airwaves for fast transmission and long signal ranges, and by the deployment of new network equipment, analysts have said.