“Usually, networks are designed for consistent traffic, like SaaS and CRM traffic, and there aren’t a lot of unpredictable traffic patterns,” said the head of AI strategy for global IT and network engineering operations at a large U.S. technology company who participated in the research. “Suddenly, three AI agents are trying to talk to each other and solve a problem. That is going to be a big thing … how do we support increased east-west traffic?”
Cisco defined aggressive AI adopters as organizations with broad generative AI deployments across the enterprise, but only 30% of those organizations said they are fully prepared to support projected AI growth across their networks. As a result, 93% of IT decision makers said they are accelerating network modernization efforts.
The report also highlighted an observability challenge that could complicate future deployments. As employees and business units increasingly experiment with AI tools, IT organizations may not know what is actually running on their networks.
