Cisco: Network architectures must be rebuilt for agentic AI | Computer Weekly

Cisco believes network architectures need a fundamental rethink for the artificial intelligence (AI) era. The task is to “modernise everywhere people work,” according to Raymond Janse van Rensburg, the company’s vice-president for networking sales and solutions engineering in Asia-Pacific, Japan and China.

That modernisation must extend beyond traditional offices, as the digital experience is now critical to success in manufacturing (for both people and robots), healthcare, retail, and other sectors.

“We’ve been here before,” Janse van Rensburg observed. Corporate networks evolved with the advent of the internet, changed again when mobility untethered employees from their desks, and shifted once more when cloud computing decentralised traffic flows away from on-premise datacentres.

Now, AI is changing traffic volumes and patterns, so organisations need to rethink their networks, he said. With predictions that each enterprise will deploy thousands of AI agents,…