You’ve heard about GPUs and data centers for AI. You may even be tapped into the power, space and cooling issues that have cropped up as AI builds get underway. But AI isn’t just a compute story. It’s also a networking story. And today’s networks may not be up to the task.
Rising in the AI realm is the concept of agentic AI. Basically, the idea is that AI will no longer just be communicating with humans but there will be an increasing number of interactions between AI agents. This is great in theory for productivity since it means a business’ AI agents can work 24/7 in the background to keep workflows moving. But all of that AI agent chatter will bring a wave of new traffic onto networks. And all of those agents will need a constant stream of data fed to them. Those two things mean networks across the board are about to face an unprecedented strain.
Obviously something needs to be done. But what?
To get our arms around the problem, we spoke with Dave Ward, currently CTO at Lumen Technologies and soon to be President and Chief Architect at Salesforce, as well as Paul Savill, who is Global Practice Leader of Networking and Edge Compute at Kyndryl.
Catch the video at top, listen to the audio edition below on the go or watch this and future episodes on YouTube!
This podcast is written and hosted by Diana Goovaerts. It is edited by Diana Goovaerts and Matt Rickman. Liz Coyne is our executive producer. Special thanks to our guests Dave Ward and Paul Savill.
To learn more about the topics in this episode:
- AWS debuts new Frontier Agents. Amazon workers aren't thrilled.
- Opinion: Edge networks face an AI traffic Armageddon
- Will AI agents really raise the network traffic baseline?
- The Five Nine: Will AI save or sink telcos?
- Calix, Google want to make agentic AI easy for broadband
- Google comes for Microsoft Copilot with Gemini Enterprise
Check out our full archive of episodes of The Five Nine right here.