The Agentic AI Era Demands a New Network

According to an article in Network World^[1], within five years, most enterprise network traffic may be generated by AI agents, not humans.

A year ago, AI copilots felt revolutionary. They drafted emails, wrote snippets of code, and summarized documents. Helpful, yes-but, ultimately, reactive on user direction.

Today, something bigger is unfolding: agentic AI. These aren't copilots waiting for a prompt. They're autonomous, goal-driven agents that act on their own. They can plan, make decisions, collaborate with other agents, and learn from the outcomes. In other words, they don't just assist work: they do the work.

That leap is exciting but also unforgiving. When agents talk to other agents, they don't have the patience of a human waiting for a web page to load. Their workflows require answers in milliseconds. Even a 100-ms delay can derail the reasoning loop and break the chain of action.

Which means that the network itself is now the stage where agentic AI either thrives or fails.

Why agentic AI breaks the rules your network still follows

The networks we rely on today were built for a world of human productivity. They were designed for:

• Predictable north-south flows (users pulling data from a data center or SaaS app)
• Latency measured in seconds or minutes
• IT tickets that could bounce through help desks before a fix was applied

That was fine for email, SaaS, or video calls. But it collapses when AI agents are in the driver's seat. Here's why.

Imagine this: one agent is troubleshooting an outage, another is rebalancing traffic policies, and a third is rewriting configurations-all in the span of a few seconds. If their back-and-forth communication is slowed by even a blink of the eye, the workflow falters. What should be completed in milliseconds either crawls or fails outright.

The problem isn't just bandwidth. It's throughput plus latency plus operations at machine speed. And that's something today's ticket-driven, human-in-the-loop networks simply can't deliver.

Where the pressure shows up

The strain is already visible in every environment, from the corporate campus to the factory floor. Consider these examples:

• On the campus: Employees spin up personal AI agents to automate tasks. AI models process 4K security camera feeds in real time. Meetings are transcribed and translated across multiple languages as they happen. Each use case creates unpredictable east-west traffic that must be handled locally, not backhauled.
• In the branch: AI-powered kiosks verify identities, analyze customer behaviors, and sync federated learning models with the cloud. A few extra milliseconds of latency can cause the customer experience to fall apart.
• On the factory floor: Machine vision spots defects at line speed. Co-bots coordinate movements with split-second timing. Safety systems monitor PPE compliance in real time. Here, every second counts, so even a minor lag can tip the balance between smooth operations and serious risk.
• In the hospital: An agent monitoring patient vitals can't afford a 100-ms pause in signaling an alert. When every heartbeat counts, latency isn't just a glitch, it's a threat to life.

Across all these scenarios, the theme is the same: AI agent-to-agent communication is relentless, bursty, and intolerant of delay.

What the new network must deliver

These pressures aren't edge cases. They are fast becoming the new normal and they expose a fundamental truth: yesterday's networks cannot keep up with the demands of machine-speed AI.

Supporting agentic AI isn't about making legacy networks faster. It requires a fundamentally different architecture that addresses latency and throughput, operations, intelligence, and security.

Ultra-low latency and high east-west throughput

Agentic workflows require near-instant response. That means fabrics must be tuned for burst-heavy east-west traffic, with inference pushed to the edge to avoid costly delays.

Agentic operations

Forget IT tickets and manual triage. In the agentic era, AI monitors AI. Agents track latency, throughput, and jitter continuously-and remediate in milliseconds, before workflows falter.

Embedded intelligence everywhere

Switches, routers, and wireless access points aren't just packet movers anymore. They need built-in telemetry, analytics, and even inference acceleration so that the network itself participates in the workflow.

Security that moves as fast as AI

AI broadens the attack surface, so the network must defend itself by default. It must deliver secure boot and runtime defenses, quantum-safe encryption, and dynamic segmentation that adapts as quickly as agents spin up and down.

This transformation isn't incremental. It's a step change: a network designed not for people, but for machines that think and act at machine speed.

How Cisco can help

AI is rewriting the rules of networking. When agents generate thousands of micro-interactions in seconds, networks must respond instantly, absorb unpredictable surges, and defend against new attack surfaces-all while IT teams remain flat. That's exactly what Cisco AI-Ready Secure Network Architecture is built to do.

Operational simplicity powered by AI

In the agentic AI era, networks can't wait for help desks and support teams. Cisco AgenticOps-with AI Canvas and AI Assistant, powered by the Deep Network Model-delivers full automation of monitoring, troubleshooting, and repairing the network. It continuously safeguards the sub-50ms performance that AI agents require to communicate with each other.

Operators can choose to keep humans in the loop for oversight or allow workflows to run fully autonomously, helping to ensure that the network always moves at the same speed as AI workloads. A unified operational plane across Meraki dashboard, Catalyst Center, SD-WAN Manager, and ThousandEyes helps to make sure that every domain is visible and consistent, so operations can keep pace with AI.

Scalable infrastructure built for AI

Agentic AI doesn't just add traffic-it reshapes it. East-west surges, local inference, and machine-to-machine exchanges put pressure on networks like never before. Cisco next-generation switches, routers, and wireless are engineered for this reality: microsecond-latency fabrics, high-density Wi-Fi 7, and industrial-grade gear that prioritizes critical AI traffic in real time. The result: when agents light up thousands of interactions per second, your network doesn't blink.

Security fused into the network

As AI use accelerates, adversaries move faster too, targeting infrastructure, exploiting identities, and harvesting encrypted data for the quantum future. Cisco embeds security directly into the fabric:

• Boot and runtime protections at the device level
• Zero trust and dynamic segmentation at the access layer
• Post-quantum encryption in motion

With secure access service edge and universal zero trust network access, every user, device, and agent session is continuously verified, so security scales at the same pace as AI.

Together, these elements of the Cisco AI-Ready Secure Network Architecture deliver a single outcome: a network that's agent-ready by design and built to sustain machine-speed communication, defend itself, and operate without human lag.

Who wins when human-scale networks end?

The agentic era ends the indulgence of slow networks and human-paced operations. If your agents can't exchange information in milliseconds, they stop working. If your east-west fabric can't absorb burst traffic, collaboration fails. If your operations depend on ticket queues, you've already lost.

The future demands networks that are latency-aware, edge-intelligent, agent-operated, and secure by design.

The networks of yesterday were built for people. The networks of tomorrow must be built for machines that think at machine speed.

Cisco is building that future-so your AI agents, and your business, stay ahead.

Unlock the future of network management with AgenticOps

^[1] AI workloads set to transform enterprise networks, Maria Korolov, Network World, April 21, 2025