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We are long, long past the point where humans can manage this network expansion. Our network management systems, billing systems and customer management systems cannot do this job the way we want it done. SoftBank said this week that it is buying chipmaker ARM for 31.4 billion. But the presence of a major chipmaker and telecom companies in the same AI-friendly portfolio makes it seem likely that deep attention will be paid to the topic.

The definition of artificial intelligence (AI) is a bit fuzzy, so when AT&T claims that it has been using AI for more than 20 years, it should be kept in mind that the AI of 1996 is a lot different from the AI of 2016. The bigger point is that the newer version is doing a lot for the carrier. AT&T is settling on an AI platform that can be used for different things instead of developing "one-off" solutions every time a task requiring the predictive capabilities and massive number-crunching abilities of AI presents itself. AI can be leveraged to anticipate rather than simply react to events, as less sophisticated AI platforms have done in the past. The driver is software-defined networks (SDNs), according to Computerworld.