Presented by Booz Allen AI-RAN, or artificial intelligence radio area networks, is a reimagining of what wireless infrastructure can do. Rather than treating the network as a passive conduit for data, AI-RAN turns it into an active computational layer. It’s a sensor, a compute fabric, and a control plane for physical operations, all rolled into one. That shift has huge implications for industries from manufacturing and logistics to healthcare and smart infrastructure.VentureBeat spoke with two leaders at the center of this transformation: Chris Christou, senior vice president at Booz Allen, and Shervin Gerami, managing director at Cerberus Operations Supply Chain Fund.“AI-RAN can bring the promise of extending 5G and eventually 6G networks into the enterprise,” Christou said. “Proving that a platform can host inference at the edge to enable new types of AI — in particular, physical AI and autonomy-type use cases for things like smart manufacturing and smart warehousing — can make operations more efficient and effective.”“AI-RAN lets enterprises move from digitizing processes to autonomously operating them,” Gerami added. “The enterprise investment should not look at AI-RAN as a networking upgrade. It’s an operating system for physical industries.”The difference between AI for RAN, AI on RAN, and AI and RANThe difference between AI for RAN, AI on RAN, and AI and RAN is critical. AI on RAN runs enterprise AI workloads on edge compute infrastructure integrated with the RAN, enabling real-time applications like computer vision, robotics, and localized LLM inference.AI and RAN represents the deeper convergence — where networks are designed to be AI-native, with AI workloads and radio infrastructu …
