This week, we’re returning to the intersection of AI and network transport.  

We recently spoke with Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson about how AI is impacting the network, demanding ever-larger pipes for data transport and training. That’s, of course, a boon for a company like Lumen, which has now signed partnership deals with cloud companies and AI pioneers Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google. 

And yet, AI itself is rapidly evolving. Within the next few years, analysts have predicted AI will shift from being mostly training workloads to being mostly inferencing use cases 

So, we posed a new version of the question to Zayo chief product officer Bill Long: what happens when AI moves to the edge? 

We spoke with Long about what demand looks like now from various players in the market, how the landscape might shift with the rise of inference, and his prediction that a fresh wave of bandwidth demand could catch the industry off guard.