The relationship between two rapidly evolving technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and telecommunications, is examined. The current use of AI is primarily as expert systems, designed to aid in diagnosing complex equipment in an offline mode. Factors that led to deployment of expert systems in telecommunications domains are examined, and the possible future evolution of both technologies is charted. It is found that both technologies share common drivers, which contribute to the mapping between future telecommunications trends and AI capabilities. This leads to an exploration of how specific applications, such as natural language processing, distributed AI, and speech recognition, may be used with expert systems in the future intelligent network.>