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When companies begin taking the first steps toward AI adoption, one of the first pieces of advice they receive is to address the quality of their data. However, another foundational element that is often overlooked, but is just as critical to the success of AI deployment, is network infrastructure.
At Cisco Live, ZDNET spoke with Anurag Dhingra, SVP and GM of the Enterprise Connectivity and Collaboration Group, to learn more about the role network infrastructure plays in the AI revolution. Dhingra stressed the importance of taking action now, as he doesn’t see a future in which network infrastructure could be an afterthought.
Also: AI agents will be ambient, but not autonomous – what that means for us
“The reason network infrastructure is a bottleneck for AI is that you can already see the span of AI agents,” said Dhingra. “Can you imagine having multiple agents that work like humans, at the speed of machines, and at the scale of machines–generating much more traffic.”
AI agents are showing up everywhere
The era of AI agents that can do tasks on your behalf is beginning. An orchestration of AI agents will work together to assist humans by accessing the same resources humans do, including the web, YouTube, and more. That will inevitably test organizations’ network infrastructure, as it adds a much larger number of individuals, whether people or agents, vying for the same connectivity.
The result? A similar experience to what you get when you go to a stadium in which too many people are competing for the same service — latency and degraded performance. Organizations must plan for this shift by ensuring their network infrastructure can support not just more users, but a more complex and constant load profile.
Beyond the pervasiveness of AI agents in the workplace, there is also work being done to make models more specialized, smaller, cheaper, and less computationally demanding. These developments are making it possible for these models to be able to run locally on devices.
“Those two things come together and lead to agents showing up everywhere in the workplace; it won’t just be data centers,” said Dhingra.
How can companies prepare?
When considering investments in network infrastructure, whether a router or a wired access point, companies often see them as short-to medium-term investments. Yet, with rapidly growing AI developments, this is changing. A Cisco survey found that 97% of businesses believe they need to upgrade their networks to make AI and IoT initiatives successful.
“Organizations should think of network infrastructure as an enabler for AI capabilities,” said Dhingra. “You want to make sure you make investments now so that next year or the year after that, this doesn’t become a bottleneck.”
Also: How Cisco plans to stop rogue AI agent attacks inside your network
Dhingra encourages companies to look at the bigger picture and warns that companies may regret making a buying decision that, in a year or two, won’t be able to scale to meet the AI-enabled productivity gains companies are targeting. Rather, he said that it would benefit companies to purchase infrastructure that can scale and is flexible.
At the conference, Cisco unveiled its latest generation of routers and switches meant to keep up with the workplace AI transformation and workload. These include new versions of the Cisco family of routers, the 8100, 8200, 8300, 8400, and 8500, as well as new versions of Cisco’s Catalyst family of campus LAN switches, the 9350 and 9610. You can read more about the hardware in ZDNET’s Tiernan Ray article, which breaks down the hardware announcements.
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