Another late writeup from PTC in Hawaii last month; this time, a panel session about ‘who actually wins’ out of networks and data centers in the AI era produced a good range of cliches, quotes, and analogies – about eggs in baskets (managing risk); sprints and marathons (infrastructure investments); science and art (capital deployments); repeats and rhymes (historical precedents); potholes and flat tires (operational missteps); white elephants (stranded assets); and cures for cancer (the upside of it all). But it also produced a useful strategy update from Verizon Business about AI at the enterprise edge.

Which was a timely thing – amid all the grandstanding at PTC about big data centre projects and backhaul builds, even as the big topic was about AI inference at the edge. Trust Verizon Business, then, to bring it home, to where AI really roosts. For well-adjusted telecom providers, Verizon sees growth not just from traditional core network demand, geared towards hyperscalers, but in dense and distributed connectivity in metro areas to support enterprise usage of AI. Which is where it has been investing (and buying) billions of dollars for a decade via its One Fiber project. At PTC, the firm also wrapped this activity into its private 5G work.

“Being able to connect with private wireless networks, and then pull all that bandwidth all the way back through inferencing – we’re incredibly bullish on what the future’s going to hold,” it said. Good stuff, and good for everyone who has been reading these RCR pages for the last 10 years, about IoT and private 5G. Because here and there at PTC, there was important talk about IoT and private 5G sensing at the enterprise edge – to give direct reign to AI sensing. It might be argued that, with inference, the whole industry will come around to the IoT worldview, finally.