Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1950s, but only in the last six years -- with the advent of open-source, low-cost cloud compute and storage -- has it become useful in solving real-world problems. In that short time, we've seen AI find new solutions in enterprise networking, automotive, medical and other industries. This has resulted in artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) moving from marketing hype to a useful tool being adopted across the enterprise. Enterprises are now seriously looking at how AIOps and AI network assistants can help their IT teams focus on more strategic problems and improve the experiences of their customers and employees. Cloud and AI are changing how enterprises support their customers and employees and how network vendors are going to support their enterprise customers by turning the customer support model upside down.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, the odds are that you have heard about the fascinating world of AI and the transformational impact it is going to have on our lives. Certain parts of the euphoria remind us of the dot-com bubble from the '90s -- when the technology hype hit its peak. There seems to be intense excitement at all levels, from CEOs and analysts to grassroots developers; all are expecting AI to not only dramatically change our lives but the world. Well, we really can't blame them, given all the excitement created by the billions of dollars being invested in this domain. With all the stars perfectly aligned, perhaps it is best to "peel the onion" a little bit in hopes of gaining a better understanding of what AI really is, why now and why all the hype, and how can it dramatically change the Telecom Industry landscape, in particular.

Perhaps now more than ever, cloud-first, AI-driven networking is critical as network administrators have their hands full helping their entire companies work remotely, according to Juniper Networks executives. Juniper in 2019 acquired AI-powered networking startup Mist Systems for $405 million for its cloud-native wireless LAN and AI technology. Juniper, now with Mist Systems' technology, is injecting AI into enterprise networks across both the wired and wireless LANs through Mist's AI engine, Marvis. Current conditions are creating "the perfect cocktail" for AI to take off today, said Juniper CEO Rami Rahim during his keynote at the company's firm's virtual AI event on Thursday. "The goal now is a self-driving network," Rahim said.

In 2004, a few unmanned vehicles showed up at the starting gate of the lengthy course across the Mojave Desert -- this was the inaugural DARPA Grand Challenge. It signified the beginning of the technological race to develop a practical self-driving car, which sparked a global movement that continues even today. The networking community too embarked on a similar journey to provide production-ready, economically feasible, Self-Driving Networks. Self-Driving Networks are autonomous networks that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to program independently and carry out prescribed intentions while eliminating complex programming and management tasks required today to run the networks. In view of this, the proliferation of data breaches and cyberattacks in today's networking environment has also increased, leading to extensive repercussions across businesses.

Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) and AIOps are both red-hot technologies. SD-WANs increase application availability, reduce costs and in some cases improve performance. AIOps infuses machine learning into IT operations to increase the level of automation. This reduces errors and enables businesses to make changes at digital speeds. Most think of these as separate technologies, but the two are on a collision course and will give rise to what I'm calling the AI-WAN.

AI-driven networking equipment provider Juniper Networks said it is ready to address the challenge and the inherent complexity that comes with networking in the multicloud era at a time when artificial intelligence is changing the IT game and fuelling the age of self-driving networks. Kicking off Juniper's fifth annual customer and partner summit - Nxtwork 2019 Emea - in London, Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim said the technology firm would take on the new challenges with products, solutions and services that transform the way people connect, work and live. He said Juniper is reorienting itself toward the enterprise and is relying heavily on the channel to help the former "box company" reach more of those customers with software and services. "What made us successful in the past is not necessarily going to make us successful in the future," said Rahim during his keynote, adding the company has been making "painful" changes that were ultimately needed to transform it. Rahim, one of the longest-serving Juniper team members, observed that AI is a "used and abused word today".

AI is changing the IT game and will fuel the age of self-driving networks, according to Juniper Networks CEO, Rami Rahim. But sadly, AI is a "used and abused word today," Rahim told attendees at last week's 2019 Juniper Nxtwork event in Sydney. "In essence, AI is human intelligence exhibited by machines. There's this notion of general AI, which is the stuff of movies. "General AI is going to come anywhere between three decades from now, to never.

Software-defined networks give you flexibility, but to make them really effective at scale we need to take humans out of the loop and use automation to respond more quickly – like taking an optical link down for maintenance and moving the traffic over to another line automatically as the latency rises. Plus, we need to do that before the speed drops enough to cause problems for the workloads relying on that connection. That kind of automation will create something more like a "self-driving" network, Juniper platform systems CTO Kireeti Kompella told Data Center Knowledge; but just as with self-driving cars, the prospect is exciting but also raises some long term concerns. This is about creating adaptive, self-customizing services built on the flexibility of SDNs and Network Function Virtualization which means that instead of being a monolithic device, network hardware exposes APIs and functions. But even though we have what Kompella calls "power sharing between equipment makers and the people who deploy networks, who want more of a say in how systems are being built," the problem is that it can also end up like parents fighting, forgetting about the children caught in the middle.

Self-driving cars are set to disrupt transportation as we know it, and the basis for that is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the age of autonomous vehicles we will tell our car something like "let's go pick up Jane" and the car will use AI to figure out that Jane is the young daughter who needs to be picked up from kindergarten which ends in 15 minutes time, and derive the destination and best route to get there safely and on time, including all real-time driving decisions to follow law and safety of passengers and surrounding (to get a taste of just how complex that is, check out Tesla's autonomous driving experiments). The same concept is now applied in networking to achieve self-driving networks. While traditionally configuring networks has been very complex, laborsome and detail-heavy, new concepts such as Software Defined Networking and Intent-Based Networking arise to enable self-driving networks. In such networks, the operator will only have to provide the "how" (the intent) and let AI figure out the "how".

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which wrote the original specification for network functions virtualisation (NFV), has set up its experiential network intelligence industry specification group to handle the task. He sees many parallels between the evolution of cars and where networks can get to. "Years ago, cars were painfully manual, but we've made it much more convenient and 14 years ago we started looking at self-driving cars, which is an absolute disruptive change." In order for self-driving networks to become a reality, vendors and providers must fully collaborate, he says. Interestingly, ETSI's AI initiative, which has an initial two-year work programme, is coming from vendors, ETSI director general Luis Jorge Romero told GTB at Mobile World Congress.