AT&T wants to use A.I. as a crystal ball

AT&T uses artificial intelligence to tell if things are going wrong in its network. Soon, A.I. may know it before it happens.

The carrier says it’s been using A.I. for decades in areas like call-center automation but developed it for each use as they came along. Now AT&T is pouring its A.I. smarts into a one platform that can be used with multiple applications.

“I can’t just keep doing this once at a time. We need a foundation,” said Mazin Gilbert, assistant vice president of the company’s Inventive Sciences division, in an interview last week at the AT&T Shape conference in San Francisco.

That foundation is about two million lines of the code that powers AT&T’s Domain 2.0 software-defined network, which the carrier built so it could roll out new services more quickly and efficiently. Along with its own A.I. code, much of which is open source, the company is using open-source components from partners including universities and third-party vendors.

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