Wireless carrier AT&T Inc. is joining with the Indian information technology services provider Tech Mahindra Ltd. to create an open-source artificial intelligence platform for developers to build, share and deploy AI applications.

The Acumos Project, announced Monday, will be hosted by the Linux Foundation, which said the platform will also provide a marketplace for accessing, using and enhancing AI apps.

AI has emerged as one of the most exciting new technologies in today’s data-driven market, but AT&T said building AI applications remains fraught with complexity and extremely expensive. To remedy those problems, what’s needed is a way to make AI apps reusable and accessible beyond the company that built them. There’s also a need to simplify deployment to lower the barrier to entry, AT&T said.

That’s what Acumos sets out to do. It’s described as an extensible framework for machine learning solutions that gives developers with the ability to edit, compose, integrate, package, train and deploy AI-based microservices. Essentially, it’s a new AI marketplace for applications that can be used to create a wide range of AI services.

“Our goal with open sourcing the Acumos platform is to make building and deploying AI applications as easy as creating a website,” Mazin Gilbert, vice president of advanced technology at AT&T Labs, said in a statement. “We’re collaborating with Tech Mahindra to establish an industry standard for AI in the networking space.”

For example, if developers want to create an AI-based app for analytics, they can choose from a variety of applications hosted by Acumos, including location tracking and facial recognition apps. Using the platform, developers simply select the AI capabilities they need and forge them together so they can function as a single app.

AT&T said that with minimal coding, such a new service could be able to identify the location of where a video was shot based on landmarks in the background and identify the people speaking in it. Acumos will support other AI models too, including those designed for augmented and virtual reality, autonomous cars, content creation and drones.

Acumos will also leverage AT&T’s Indigo platform, which is a software-defined, data-powered network for delivering faster Internet speeds, the company said.

Although some might be surprised to see AT&T taking a lead in AI, the wireless operator is no stranger to the world of open-source. Earlier this year it donated its ECOMP virtualized networking platform to the Linux Foundation, saying it will release all 8.5 million lines of code in the coming months. AT&T’s goal is to make ECOMP, which it has developed internally over several years, the telecom industry’s standard platform for automating and managing virtual network functions and other networking capabilities.

With the Acumos Project, AT&T said, it’s also going to enhance its approach to releasing internal projects to the open-source community. “We’re getting the initial framework into open source as quickly as possible,” AT&T said in a statement. “That way, the developer community can accelerate the development of the platform.”

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