AI's Future Depends on What Lies Beneath

By: Roger Cummings

Despite being once labeled “science fiction”, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now become our new reality. Businesses are integrating AI into their operations, and headlines are filled with news covering numerous breakthroughs. Yet, beneath the excitement lies a critical issue: the infrastructure that drives entire systems is in urgent need of improvement.  Every intelligent response, real-time insight, or automated decision depends on a tightly coordinated network of computing, storage, and network systems that demand speed, accuracy, and scalability to function as desired…

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Beyond Automation: Agentic AI as the
Catalyst for Unlocking Telco Growth

By: Guy Lupo

CSPs are uniquely positioned to unlock the full potential of agentic AI. They already possess the essential ingredients for success: mature infrastructure, advanced technologies, and skilled talent. As data-rich organizations by design, CSPs operate across highly distributed architectures and adhere to some of the strictest standards of regulatory compliance, sovereignty, and security – traits that are increasingly critical for deploying trusted AI at scale. Their operational track record managing complex systems enables them to pursue AI-driven transformation with confidence and credibility…

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The Foundation for Network Monetization

By: Suchismita Mohanty

Having made significant recent investments in network infrastructure, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) need to monetize such investments through new revenue streams from both existing and new sources. With consumer revenues under pressure, focus turns more to the wholesale and enterprise opportunity and, in particular, to communications-enabling applications in vertical industries (e.g., healthcare, public safety, etc.) to afford such applications greater reach or fundamentally enable new capabilities to drive higher value to their end customers…

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Latency as the New Currency: Innovations
Driving the Next Frontier in AI Connectivity

By: Ivo Ivanov

The meteoric impact of artificial intelligence over the past few years is difficult to overstate, and progress is moving so quickly that it is better measured in months rather than years. Some of the biggest tech events of the year, such as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and Mobile World Congress (MWC), were dominated by emerging AI use cases, from LLM-powered humanoid robots to “sight beyond sight” vehicle-to-cloud software capable of giving cars human-like senses. Businesses also have high expectations for the next generation of AI, testing and deploying everything from problem-solving AI agents to advanced data analytics and forecasting tools…

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The Societal Effects of GenAI

By: Mark Cummings, Ph.D.

In the last year, it has become clear that GenAI will have dramatic impacts on society. While having tremendous productivity benefits, these impacts are coming so fast, are so broad and so deep that they can produce difficulties. A taxonomy of these effects helps to clarify the situation. With this clarity, it can be seen that the GenAI effects are taking us into a difficult period of adjustment. The challenge is to maximize the productivity benefits GenAI is bringing while minimizing the difficulties in the transition…

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Agents of Change: The Digital-Twin-Led
Transformation of Telco CX

By: Olgay Tas

Telecom operators today face rising complexity and heightened customer expectations. Static customer profiles, siloed systems, and fragmented data can no longer support the shift to AI-driven, hyper-personalized service experiences. This is where Digital Twins come into the picture: a living, evolving representation of a customer that fuses real-time behavioural, transactional, and contextual data, that transforms customer engagement and decision making.  Traditional CRM tools and churn models are typically static and reactive; they offer only broad segmentation and targeting, and they are not capable of adapting to constantly changing usage trends…

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When Six-month Plans Meet Six-second Solutions

By: Mark Shedd

In 2023, a new AI foundation model was released every 2.4 days.  Let that sink in for a moment. While your leadership team was scheduling quarterly strategy reviews, the fundamental building blocks of artificial intelligence were evolving faster than most companies could update their software.  I've been watching companies get steamrolled by their own planning processes for twenty years, but 2024 was different. That relentless pace—149 foundation models in a single year—created something I'd never seen before: six-month strategies becoming obsolete before the ink dried…

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Powering the Mid-Market Revolution
AI for UC and Better SMB CX

By: Tony Martino

The power and accessibility of AI have never been greater, but arguably, adoption has been more prevalent across larger enterprises. Many Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have struggled to drive tangible return on investment for customers in the smaller and mid-market segments, owing to limited resources, lack of in-house expertise, and the perception that such technologies are complex, costly, and better suited to larger organisations.  However, market-ready, out-of-the-box AI-powered solutions are now available for businesses of all sizes, and the SMB sector represents a massive opportunity…

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AI’s Frenetic Pace and its Impact on
Data Center Optimization

By: Tod Higinbotham

Data center operators are facing an infrastructure crisis. According to the International Energy Agency, electricity demand for data centers will more than double by 2030, with AI-specific workloads quadrupling their energy use. AI workloads consume power and generate heat at levels that traditional systems simply cannot handle.   This isn't just about adding more capacity — it's about fundamentally reimagining how data centers operate. According to a recent report on Scaling AI Infrastructure, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) clusters now draw tens of megawatts while exhibiting unpredictable power spikes…

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Human-AI Cognitive Friction

By: Dr. Marty Trevino

Despite untold global investment in analytics and technical systems, including AI platforms, most organizations report marginal improvements in strategic decision-making performance. The fundamental problem isn't computational power, data availability, quality, or algorithmic sophistication; rather, it's the incongruent design of modern systems with the human brain, which creates cognitive friction when the brain is forced to interact with interfaces designed around deterministic precepts and technological constraints rather than cognitive science principles…

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Letter from the Editor

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

If I’ve learned anything in my more than half a century on this planet, it’s that humans are fallible. We have issues, emotions, get sick, and must rest. Even in the best case, we’re only here for a relatively brief period and are productive for only about half of it. The world, on the other hand, has been here for billions of years, and modern civilization for thousands.While the world is still spinning, and ideally while we are still living on it, there’s a lot to do and even more to manage…

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IT & Telecom Industry News

By: Thomas Board - Pipeline

From groundbreaking AI advancements and next-gen network deployments to major cloud innovations and market-shaping acquisitions, the industry delivered a wave of transformative developments across the communications and IT sectors. The month’s top industry news stories are summarized below. To view current breaking news in real-time, visit Pipeline’s News Center, follow Pipeline on social media, or subscribe to receive our weekly industry enterprise and communications technology news summary…

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