Guest Editorial: Special Section on Embracing Artificial Intelligence for Network and Service Management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to leverage the immense amount of operational data of clouds, services, and social and communication networks. As a concrete example, AI techniques have been adopted by telcom operators to develop virtual assistants based on advances in natural language processing (NLP) for interaction with customers and machine learning (ML) to enhance the customer experience by improving customer flow. Machine learning has also been applied to finding fraud patterns which enables operators to focus on dealing with the activity as opposed to the previous focus on detecting fraud.