LAS VEGAS - Today AT&T introduces the concept of AT&T Network 3.0 Indigo. It’s the company's major push to create a trusted environment where organizations can share data and collaborate on analytics.

Imagine this simple example. A city has an electric utility, an internet company and a major heating/air conditioning repair company. They join a technician dispatch community to share their data – such as vehicle, traffic and appointment data. Through cooperative machine-learning and the broader data set, they get better and better at timing their dispatches. Their work becomes more efficient and customers are happier. And they are still able to keep their proprietary information safe.

Now imagine a data community that would be more complicated but is quite real and exciting: healthcare. Doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and researchers all want better, trusted ways to share data while maintaining patient privacy. This could speed the cure of cancer and other diseases. Patients could participate in medical trials far away from university hospitals.

At the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas today, AT&T announced the Indigo concept. And the company invited the audience to think about how they’d like to contribute. Look for a technical summary paper soon, along with a mechanism to share ideas.

Much of the public may think of “the cloud” as a single space. But any business knows better. Data in the cloud is locked in silos intentionally, so it can’t be shared outside an organization or between clouds. This stymies the important global trend toward open innovation and open algorithms. Machine learning and artificial intelligence simply work better when they can train themselves on more data. In other words, everyone will do better if the very real hurdles to sharing can be overcome.

AT&T sees AT&T Network 3.0 Indigo as having three pillars: