Dive Brief:

• AT&T said it’s building a single platform for its artificial intelligence applications, according to a report from the IDG News Service. 
• The new platform will allow the carrier to get even more intelligent data out of its AI efforts.
• The company said it is using its own open-source code for the platform, as well as code from universities and vendors.

Dive Insight:

AT&T is not alone in its pursuit of AI as a business game changer. Last month, D. Scott Phoenix, the co-founder of AI startup Vicarious, predicted that the tech industry is on the cusp of a major breakthrough in AI due to the availability of huge amounts of data and cheap storage, memory and computing power. A Bank of America report citing IDC research recently predicted that the AI industry will grow to $70 billion by 2020 from just $8.2 billion in 2013.

AT&T has been using AI for decades, according to Mazin Gilbert, assistant vice president of AT&T’s Inventive Sciences division, but each application was developed individually along the way.

"I can’t just keep doing this once at a time. We need a foundation," Gilbert told the News Service last week at the AT&T Shape conference.

With the new platform, the company hopes to predict events such as system failures rather than just react to them. The idea, Gilbert said, is that AI systems could predict occurrences so well that the company may even eventually change the way they do business.