This post was originally published on Network Computing
As the GenAI hype wave gathered momentum in 2024, networking vendors lost no time in declaring their products AI-ready or AI-enabled. Some even crowned themselves leaders in AI networking, though it’s far from clear what that really means.
Behind the AI-washing are three simple facts about the impact of AI on networking:
AI will put new demands on networks, affecting performance, capacity requirements, costs, and operational complexity
Networking vendors will increasingly use AI inside their platforms to improve performance, reliability, and security and to automate network operations
The limitations of existing network architecture in a world where users and applications are everywhere and anywhere were already clear before AI. Post AI, legacy architecture will struggle to cope.
The first of these trends will drive the second. Using AI to enhance existing capabilities will be necessary to make networks resilient in the face of capacity, security, and performance challenges and to make them adaptive as enterprises contend with accelerating pressure to innovate and turn on a dime.
The AI revolution coincides with other fundamental changes to the way we think about and use networks, namely:
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— Read the rest of this post, which was originally published on Network Computing.