Cisco’s new study, AI Impact on Wide Area Networks 2026, finds AI and agentic AI will not only increase traffic volume but also, “they will change traffic shape, symmetry, duration, and criticality,” the study reports. “AI inference paths will become strategic network assets, requiring high levels of resilience, observability, and differentiated treatment, for example, Quality of Service (QoS) and path security.”
The report combines real-world traffic analysis (using Cisco’s Crosswork Assurance User Experience service), third-party industry data, and Cisco-controlled lab tests of AI agents. The research examined a number of parameters, including direct measurement of live AI inference traffic across service provider networks as well as tests of AI traffic characteristics, to train models that identify and precisely track AI flows across the network.
“For service providers, network architects, and digital infrastructure leaders, the real risk is not that AI traffic will appear overnight. The real risk is assuming it behaves like everything else when it doesn’t,” wrote Javier Antich, principal product management engineer, and Guru Shenoy, senior vice president of Cisco provider connectivity, in a blog post about the study.
Agents operate at machine speed instead of human speed, and that changes everything, the authors stated.
