Here’s another task you likely will have to add to your AI to-do list: Upgrade your enterprise’s Wi-Fi network.
Almost half – 43% -- of enterprises are still running Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), according to IEEE Spectrum, in an article on Cisco’s recently-released State of Wireless report. Wi-Fi 5 was released in 2013, the IEEE Spectrum points out, and cites the Cisco report’s finding that, “less than one-fifth of organizations have upgraded their wireless networks to any Wi-Fi standard released during the present decade. (Wi-Fi 6E was first released in 2021, while Wi-Fi 7, the current standard, came out in 2024.)”
“Wi-Fi 5 only offers speeds of up to 3.5 gigabits per second, which doesn’t cut it in a streaming and AI world,” the IEEE Spectrum article continues. “The 13-year-old standard often can’t handle high-bandwidth and low-latency needs, especially in device-dense environments.”
IEEE Spectrum expects most enterprises that haven’t upgraded will leapfrog the Wi-Fi 6E standard and go straight to Wi-Fi 7 as compliant gear becomes widely available. The emerging Wi-Fi 8 standard will not only be even more optimized for carrying AI-driven traffic; it will include AI chips on board the access points (APs), allowing many tasks to be carried out locally rather than at the Wi-Fi system level, according to the IEEE publication.
As the article notes, it’s not just AI that will overstress aging Wi-Fi networks; real-time video traffic continues to grow, and in an era of Return-to-Office (RTO), this traffic load will increase in volume, quality of service requirements, and security risk. Workers will almost certainly continue to be highly mobile within the office, meaning the wireless network is likely to be the default connection for most of these employees.
It will be interesting to watch the quality of service issue evolve. Before the AI boom, real-time communications traffic (i.e., video and voice) was clearly the highest-priority class. It should continue to hold that position against many of the early-generation AI apps; delaying a response to a GenAI prompt is less disruptive than breaking up video or voice streams, which become useless if too much delay is introduced.
On the other hand, if enterprises begin deploying agentic AI more heavily, I have to wonder if the integrations and interdependencies of these workflows could require them to receive higher priority. Will enterprises have to worry about cascading delays as agentic AI traffic moves through the web of applications and processes it leverages?
We ran a session last March at Enterprise Connect 2026 whose title made the assertion: “Network ‘Plumbing’ in the AI Age: More Essential Than Ever.” The session leader, Sorell Slaymaker of TechVision Research, highlighted network reliability, speeds, agility, data replication, and security/compliance. Much of this requires a focus on the UCaaS and CCaaS services that enterprises increasingly rely on. But for employees in offices, the “last mile” to the desktop or laptop that’s been carried into a conference room means Wi-Fi. And this is an area you’ll likely need to spend money and time on.
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