By Hugo Vliegen,
Publication Date: 2026-08-03 15:00:00
“The network is evolving from carrying human-generated traffic to enabling AI-powered operations.”
SD-WAN is the policy and routing layer that connects branches, campuses, data centers, and cloud services across any transport. Most enterprise networks were built around a durable assumption: people generate traffic.
Employees open applications, join meetings, access cloud services, and exchange data in patterns that are largely understandable. SD-WAN evolved to make those interactions more reliable, secure, and cost-effective.
AI is beginning to break that assumption. As copilots become autonomous agents, machines increasingly generate network traffic on behalf of people: retrieving data, calling APIs, coordinating actions, and making decisions across sites, clouds, and edge environments. A single AI agent request can trigger dozens of machine-to-machine exchanges that no human initiated directly.
For CIOs, the issue is not simply whether AI will consume more bandwidth. It is…
