India, July 23 -- Artificial intelligence (AI) agents could increase enterprise network traffic by as much as 450% when performing tasks that would traditionally be executed by humans, with nearly 70% of that additional traffic comprising AI inference, according to AI Impact on Wide Area Networks: Cisco 2026 report.

The findings suggest that the rapid adoption of agentic AI may place significantly greater demands on an enterprise's wide area networks (WANs), requiring organisations to rethink capacity planning, network resilience and traffic management as AI becomes embedded in business workflows.

It projects that AI inference traffic could account for around 25% of total network traffic by 2035, while enterprise network traffic could ...