Cisco executive Bob Everson testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media on July 30 about how AI is affecting networks. The hearing was titled “Intelligent Networks: Powering Artificial Intelligence and Transforming Communications.”
Senator Deb Fischer said the committee would examine how widespread AI use has forced networks to evolve and require more capacity and more complex designs.
What Cisco said the traffic numbers show
Everson said Cisco measured a fourfold increase in AI inference traffic over eight months. Cisco also said an AI agent generated 450% more traffic than a person doing the same task, and about 70% of the extra traffic was inference.
Those figures are the core of Cisco’s case: AI is not just adding load, it is changing the shape of that load. Cisco’s testimony points to more uplink-heavy traffic, longer-lived sessions, and more pressure on networks that were built around downstream content delivery.
Campus and branch networks are already feeling it
Everson said customers in campus and branch networks reported a 34% increase in AI-related traffic over the last 12 months and expect a 96% increase in the coming year. He also said half of enterprise customers report that AI demand is concentrated on their Wi-Fi networks.
At the same time, 73% of organizations already face or expect campus and branch capacity limitations within the next 24 months. For operators and enterprise network teams, that is a reminder that AI strain is showing up first where wireless access and branch design meet demand spikes.
Cisco is tying the message to 5G-Advanced and 6G
Everson said Cisco is investing across multiple areas of AI-native networking and is building toward 6G while bringing new capabilities to 5G-Advanced today. He also said AI-WIN is a collaboration among Cisco, NVIDIA, MITRE, Orion Development Company, Booz Allen, and T-Mobile focused on secure AI-native networking from 5G-Advanced to 6G.
Everson urged Congress to focus on compute, core networking, and applications as areas where the United States has strategic leadership. That keeps the testimony from being just a network-capacity warning; Cisco is also using the hearing to frame where it wants policy attention to land.
What this means for network planners
For enterprise and service-provider planners, the immediate signal is that Cisco is pushing AI traffic growth, Wi-Fi concentration, and campus capacity limits into the same policy conversation. The company is also linking that load to its own 5G-Advanced and 6G roadmap, which makes this more than a one-off Senate appearance.
That matters because the testimony gives Cisco a public way to anchor network refresh discussions around AI demand rather than generic upgrade cycles.