We have spent the last decade obsessing over bandwidth. For years, the metric of success for enterprise infrastructure was simple: how big is the pipe?
But as Artificial Intelligence reshapes business models, that metric is rapidly becoming obsolete. If you are a founder or CIO building your strategy around “speed,” you might be solving the wrong problem.
The New System Dependency
Here is the brutal truth about the AI age: Speed is not the same as performance.
Julian Skeels, Chief Digital Officer at Expereo, identifies a critical shift in how we must view connectivity. “In the world of AI, networking actually becomes a system dependency,” he notes. “When the network degrades, the application degrades immediately.”
Unlike traditional web traffic, AI workloads are distributed, continuous, and incredibly latency-sensitive. Inference, retrieval, and remediation never stop. If your network hiccups, your AI doesn’t just buffer—it fails to deliver intelligent outcomes. The new requirement isn’t raw speed; it is certainty.
The Visibility Paradox
Many business leaders are currently trapped in a state of “connectivity everywhere but visibility nowhere.”
You likely operate across hybrid networks, multiple clouds, and various service providers. This fragmentation creates a constant operational drag. Your teams are drowning in portals, yet they lack a single, clear view of what is actually happening.
Skeels argues that the solution is not more tools. “What they want is clarity and control,” he says. Leaders need to know that data movement is deterministic—predictable, governable, and resilient under continual change.
Stop Buying More Dashboards
There is a misconception that “visibility” means having more data points to look at. It doesn’t.
True visibility in the AI era is about connecting network behavior directly to business outcomes—specifically resilience, security, and cost. It is about “visibility at the speed of life.”
Emerging technologies like agentic AI are finally making this possible, transforming global connectivity from a manual, opaque struggle into something as seamless as cloud computing. But to get there, we have to let go of old habits.
Time to Unlearn
The strategies that built the networks of the last ten years won’t support the intelligence of the next ten. “A lot of what we’ve taken for granted about networks no longer holds in an AI world,” Skeels warns.
For business owners, the challenge now isn’t just adopting new tech—it is unlearning the legacy rules of infrastructure. It is time to stop optimizing for how fast you can go, and start optimizing for how certain you can be.
