Artificial intelligence (AI) is nothing new, but it is having its latest day in the sun because, at last, there is sufficient affordable compute and storage power to make it viable outside specialized labs. With associated disciplines like machine learning (ML), it has the potential to make sense of the vast quantities of data generated by connected people, cars and ‘things’, and to transmit instructions back to those objects so that they can act autonomously. Those processes appear to present a significant opportunity for mobile operators, since the connected robots, cars and sensors will have to communicate with the central AI engine in the cloud, often over mobile links. But those links are themselves challenging, since many AI-enabled applications will…