Will telephone companies be the railroad tycoons of the AI age?

During America's Gilded Age, a handful of scrappy entrepreneurs built the nation's railway system and in the process created huge piles of money by controlling shipping and travel lanes across the country. Today, as AI hype begins consuming everything in sight, some are hinting that mobile network operators—and their equipment vendors—may be sitting in a similar position thanks to the data they own. After all, AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on. That's why Google is reportedly paying Reddit $60 million every year. And the telecommunications industry has an enormous amount of data. "It's very valuable," said Elena Fersman, an Ericsson VP. Fersman, the head of Ericsson's Global AI Accelerator effort, said network data can be used to train AI models. However, there are only a few companies talking publicly about how they might use—and profit—from their data troves. For example, AT&T business exec Mike Troiano declined to discuss whether AT&T would consider selling access to its data in order to train AI models.