How Artificial Intelligence is Directly Related to Core Telecom Service Revenues

It is not always completely obvious how various technologies are related to the core of the telecom industry. Consider artificial intelligence, which might be considered an esoteric matter of little direct relevance for core telecom service revenues.

So here's an argument about why artificial intelligence (or machine learning or cognitive technologies in general are of direct relevance for tier-one telecom service providers.

After the mobile data market has reached saturation, and amidst declines in all other legacy service revenues, how will tier-one service providers replace at least half of all current revenues within a decade? 

Some of us argue that, at the moment, the conceivable big new revenues come from the broad Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communications areas, simply because all those sensors and servers will require communications, often mobile communications.

So core telecom revenues might substantially hinge on IoT and M2M. But making sense of all that data necessarily requires a number of other developments, including artificial intelligence (or machine learning or cognitive technologies). 

In that sense, artificial intelligence (the ability to make sense of mountains of possibly unstructured data) is directly related to the future of core telecom service revenues. 

That might be why IBM’s Watson will be embedded into Cisco routers and services.

So IoT essentially requires artificial intelligence, and mobile operators require the big revenues IoT will drive.