In response to an article in Community World[1], inside 5 years, most enterprise community site visitors could also be generated by AI brokers, not people.
A 12 months in the past, AI copilots felt revolutionary. They drafted emails, wrote snippets of code, and summarized paperwork. Useful, sure—however, finally, reactive on person path.
At the moment, one thing larger is unfolding: agentic AI. These aren’t copilots ready for a immediate. They’re autonomous, goal-driven brokers that act on their very own. They’ll plan, make choices, collaborate with different brokers, and study from the outcomes. In different phrases, they don’t simply help work: they do the work.
That leap is thrilling but additionally unforgiving. When brokers discuss to different brokers, they don’t have the endurance of a human ready for an online web page to load. Their workflows require solutions in milliseconds. Even a 100-ms delay can derail the reasoning loop and break the chain of motion.
Which implies that the community itself is now the stage the place agentic AI both thrives or fails.
Why agentic AI breaks the foundations your community nonetheless follows
The networks we depend on right this moment had been constructed for a world of human productiveness. They had been designed for:
- Predictable north-south flows (customers pulling knowledge from a knowledge middle or SaaS app)
- Latency measured in seconds or minutes
- IT tickets that might bounce by way of assist desks earlier than a repair was utilized
That was fantastic for electronic mail, SaaS, or video calls. Nevertheless it collapses when AI brokers are within the driver’s seat. Right here’s why.
Think about this: one agent is troubleshooting an outage, one other is rebalancing site visitors insurance policies, and a 3rd is rewriting configurations—all within the span of some seconds. If their back-and-forth communication is slowed by even a blink of the attention, the workflow falters. What needs to be accomplished in milliseconds both crawls or fails outright.
The issue isn’t simply bandwidth. It’s throughput plus latency plus operations at machine pace. And that’s one thing right this moment’s ticket-driven, human-in-the-loop networks merely can’t ship.
The place the stress exhibits up
The pressure is already seen in each atmosphere, from the company campus to the manufacturing unit ground. Contemplate these examples:
- On the campus: Staff spin up private AI brokers to automate duties. AI fashions course of 4K safety digital camera feeds in actual time. Conferences are transcribed and translated throughout a number of languages as they occur. Every use case creates unpredictable east-west site visitors that have to be dealt with domestically, not backhauled.
- Within the department: AI-powered kiosks confirm identities, analyze buyer behaviors, and sync federated studying fashions with the cloud. A couple of further milliseconds of latency may cause the client expertise to crumble.
- On the manufacturing unit ground: Machine imaginative and prescient spots defects at line pace. Co-bots coordinate actions with split-second timing. Security techniques monitor PPE compliance in actual time. Right here, each second counts, so even a minor lag can tip the stability between clean operations and severe danger.
- Within the hospital: An agent monitoring affected person vitals can’t afford a 100-ms pause in signaling an alert. When each heartbeat counts, latency isn’t only a glitch, it’s a menace to life.
Throughout all these eventualities, the theme is similar: AI agent-to-agent communication is relentless, bursty, and illiberal of delay.
What the brand new community should ship
These pressures aren’t edge circumstances. They’re quick changing into the brand new regular they usually expose a elementary fact: yesterday’s networks can not sustain with the calls for of machine-speed AI.
Supporting agentic AI isn’t about making legacy networks sooner. It requires a essentially completely different structure that addresses latency and throughput, operations, intelligence, and safety.
Extremely-low latency and excessive east-west throughput
Agentic workflows require near-instant response. Meaning materials have to be tuned for burst-heavy east-west site visitors, with inference pushed to the sting to keep away from expensive delays.
Agentic operations
Overlook IT tickets and guide triage. Within the agentic period, AI displays AI. Brokers observe latency, throughput, and jitter repeatedly—and remediate in milliseconds, earlier than workflows falter.
Embedded intelligence in every single place
Switches, routers, and wi-fi entry factors aren’t simply packet movers anymore. They want built-in telemetry, analytics, and even inference acceleration in order that the community itself participates within the workflow.
Safety that strikes as quick as AI
AI broadens the assault floor, so the community should defend itself by default. It should ship safe boot and runtime defenses, quantum-safe encryption, and dynamic segmentation that adapts as shortly as brokers spin up and down.
This transformation isn’t incremental. It’s a step change: a community designed not for individuals, however for machines that suppose and act at machine pace.
How Cisco might help
AI is rewriting the foundations of networking. When brokers generate 1000’s of micro-interactions in seconds, networks should reply immediately, take up unpredictable surges, and defend in opposition to new assault surfaces—all whereas IT groups stay flat. That’s precisely what Cisco AI-Prepared Safe Community Structure is constructed to do.
Operational simplicity powered by AI
Within the agentic AI period, networks can’t look forward to assist desks and assist groups. Cisco AgenticOps—with AI Canvas and AI Assistant, powered by the Deep Community Mannequin—delivers full automation of monitoring, troubleshooting, and repairing the community. It repeatedly safeguards the sub-50ms efficiency that AI brokers require to speak with one another.
Operators can select to maintain people within the loop for oversight or permit workflows to run totally autonomously, serving to to make sure that the community at all times strikes on the identical pace as AI workloads. A unified operational airplane throughout Meraki dashboard, Catalyst Middle, SD-WAN Supervisor, and ThousandEyes helps to ensure that each area is seen and constant, so operations can hold tempo with AI.
Scalable infrastructure constructed for AI
Agentic AI doesn’t simply add site visitors—it reshapes it. East-west surges, native inference, and machine-to-machine exchanges put stress on networks like by no means earlier than. Cisco next-generation switches, routers, and wi-fi are engineered for this actuality: microsecond-latency materials, high-density Wi-Fi 7, and industrial-grade gear that prioritizes important AI site visitors in actual time. The outcome: when brokers gentle up 1000’s of interactions per second, your community doesn’t blink.
Safety fused into the community
As AI use accelerates, adversaries transfer sooner too, concentrating on infrastructure, exploiting identities, and harvesting encrypted knowledge for the quantum future. Cisco embeds safety immediately into the material:
- Boot and runtime protections on the machine degree
- Zero belief and dynamic segmentation on the entry layer
- Submit-quantum encryption in movement
With safe entry service edge and common zero belief community entry, each person, machine, and agent session is repeatedly verified, so safety scales on the identical tempo as AI.
Collectively, these parts of the Cisco AI-Prepared Safe Community Structure ship a single final result: a community that’s agent-ready by design and constructed to maintain machine-speed communication, defend itself, and function with out human lag.
Who wins when human-scale networks finish?
The agentic period ends the indulgence of sluggish networks and human-paced operations. In case your brokers can’t alternate data in milliseconds, they cease working. In case your east-west cloth can’t take up burst site visitors, collaboration fails. In case your operations rely upon ticket queues, you’ve already misplaced.
The long run calls for networks which might be latency-aware, edge-intelligent, agent-operated, and safe by design.
The networks of yesterday had been constructed for individuals. The networks of tomorrow have to be constructed for machines that suppose at machine pace.
Cisco is constructing that future—so your AI brokers, and what you are promoting, keep forward.
[1] AI workloads set to rework enterprise networks, Maria Korolov, Community World, April 21, 2025
