Telecom service providers will use AI to manage and operate networks or many of their businesses won’t survive.

That’s one of the key findings of Light Reading's recent report, and it's based on the simple economics of price, cost and profitability.

Telecom is a capital-intensive business with high fixed costs, which puts pressure on service providers to control variable costs, especially human capital. This has always been an issue, but recently it’s getting worse.

In 2017, Tom Nolle of CIMI Corporation estimated that many CSPs crossed the point where revenue per bit was lower than cost per bit in 2017. Threatened by fast and highly efficient web-scale companies, service providers are straining under the challenge posed by digital transformation. On top of that, they must solve how to manage and operate the dizzyingly complex 5G networks profitably. IoT use cases, ranging from autonomous cars and industry sensors to smart cities create a multiplier effect for network complexity. Most experts believe 5G network monitoring and management will largely be beyond human control, and that AI-fueled automation is the only way CSPs will be able to offer future network services.