The AI-enabled network is here. The pitch is stuck in traffic

AT&T's network CTO, Yigal Elbaz, cited the robotaxi as a bellwether for how AI is affecting network traffic, and his point holds regardless of Waymo's current troubles. Each vehicle generates about 20 gigabytes of data per day, roughly 30 times the amount a typical mobile user consumes. Most of that traffic flows from the car to the cloud. The network is being asked to run in reverse, and that's a major structural shift, arriving faster than the industry's planning cycles can handle. "Every other week," Elbaz noted, "a new flavor of a frontier AI model drops on us." AT&T CEO John Stankey made the same point, in slightly more investor-friendly language, at his company's annual shareholder meeting earlier this month. AI, he said, will transform network requirements "beyond download speeds to the ability to support more symmetrical traffic upstream just as much as downstream." The network the industry spent a decade optimizing for video consumption is ill-suited to the world that's arriving. Both AT&T and Comcast are already rebuilding at scale.