Preparing for what’s next: Future-proofing networks for artificial intelligence, IoT, and smart infrastructure

The confluence of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and technology-enhanced physical environments is leading to an era of pace-setting transformation within communities, organizations, and entire economies. Responsive, resource-aware, and risk-adjusted networks will be the cornerstone of exponentiating returns blended with remediating governance gaps and collaboration challenges. While dynamically adapting to changing requirements, responsive networks will apply AI machine learning at the edge to optimize themselves. By establishing trustless network slices for billion-device deployments of supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised learning, resource usage and risk management for IoT move into the kilobit range. Secure dynamic automation of business processes across smart infrastructure will challenge conventional app-driven non-IoT experiences delivered by smartphones (Arora & Bhardwaj, 2021; Khan et al., 2021; Atakishiyev et al., 2024). As AI, IoT devices, and digital twins of the smart environment enable user-centric digital experiences, they will drive a rupture of the existing limits on physical space and sense-making for intelligence augmentation. Leading network operators will enhance their value mediation role and embrace a change from internalization of user value to externalization as confidence intermediary, while cooperating with other trusted, trusted-less, and non-trusted intermediaries in the converging markets for IoT and public safety. A key methodological contribution lies in the linkage of a macroeconomic monetary growth model with microeconomic service flow allocation rules under resource flow bottlenecks and finite planning horizons. Together with the applied research questions it enables intelligent network factorizations. Thereby, existing high-level derivations of technological readiness for an all-optical future are brought to verification by establishing specific physical layer conditions for arrival at key technology readiness milestones. Potential use cases, including unified networking for auxiliary sensing and time transfer in emerging wireless connectivity markets, are detailed.