Every telecommunications service provider is operationalizing AI right now. Use cases include customer care-bots, network operation co-pilots, and managed AI-as-a-service (AIaaS) for external enterprise customers and others. The uncomfortable part is correlation of use case with business case, where the key factor is the cost of the AI accelerator, whether that's a graphics processing unit (GPU), tensor processing unit (TPU), or neural processing unit (NPU). Cost per inference decides whether these AI accelerators improve profit margins or erode them; to keep costs down, the AI model you sele