There's good evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) has become a bigger reality for cable operators in the past year, as they have begun to expand the technology beyond customer care chatbots applications to include network monitoring and management duties. While adoption among MSOs is still in the early stages, it's not hard to see how AI's talent for gathering and analyzing millions of data points per second can be put to use in cable networks, automating fault detection and traffic monitoring. And that, in turn, may speed the evolution toward self-aware networks able to automatically fix outages while stopping content pirates and hackers dead in their tracks.