- Graphiant CEO Ali Shaikh said carriers are moving fast to take advantage of AI, defying their history of slow movement - AI gives carriers compelling opportunity to move beyond commodity connectivity - Graphiant provides a network-as-a-service platform to enable AI and post-quantum cryptography Telcos are moving surprisingly fast as AI gives them a rare opportunity to expand beyond commodity connectivity, Graphiant CEO Ali Shaikh said. Shaikh, who was named CEO of the network-as-a-service platform provider in October after serving as chief product officer, said the change in carrier behavior caught him off guard. "If you'd asked me when we were starting this company, would the telcos move as fast as I see them moving, at that time, I would have said probably not," Shaikh said in an interview. "Our experience in the last 12 months has been that they're moving pretty aggressively because they have a compelling event in the market that they can use to increase their margins — that event being AI." Why are telcos in a hurry? Shaikh pointed to two forces pushing carriers off the sidelines. The first is, obviously, AI. The second is post-quantum cryptography, replacing encryption that quantum computers are expected to break. Google puts "Q-day," the day quantum computers overpower encryption, around 2028, the U.S. government around 2030 and Cloudflare at 2029. The AI opportunity divides between "AI for networking" — using agents and analytics to automate operations — and "networking for AI" — using the network to enable AI, Shaikh said. IP backbones built for the original internet on BGP and MPLS still run on manual, box-by-box configuration, and a carrier circuit can take six months to provision, Shaikh said. Graphiant accelerates the process. "AI doesn't have six months to wait for a circuit," Shaikh said. Networks must become "more ephemeral,