AI is going to transform our networks

There are a lot of unanswered questions about AI and telecommunications, but one thing is for certain—AI is going to change networks. For starters, inferencing traffic behaves differently. As a new Cisco report tells us, AI data flows are not at all like the "human-paced, bursty video streams" networks are currently optimized for. "By 2035, one-quarter of network traffic is projected to be AI inference," it says. "These flows don't behave like the web. They live longer, demand more upstream capacity, and operate at software speed, not human speed." The connectivity between an agent and its AI models is a "critical dependency," and any network degradation would directly impair agent functionality, the report argues. "AI and agentic AI will not just increase traffic volume—they will change traffic shape, symmetry, duration, and criticality." Then there's the inevitability that hyperscalers will dominate AI infrastructure and traffic—and telephone companies will have to build around them.