By 2027, the majority of machines will be talking to each other on the Internet

The Internet was actually intended as a medium for communication between people. Increasingly, however, it serves as a channel for AI systems in particular to communicate with each other. This will even dominate the traffic soon.

Bot traffic is increasing massively

According to Matthew Prince, head of the infrastructure operator Cloudflare, data traffic through automated programs will surpass that of humans in the coming year. By 2027 at the latest, bots could cause more activity on the internet than human users, Prince explained, according to a report in US magazine TechCrunch at the SXSW technology conference in Austin. The main reason for this development is the rapid progress of generative AI.

Such systems require enormous amounts of data and access countless websites automatically. While a human might only visit a few pages when searching for a product, AI-driven programs search thousands of sources at the same time. This massive difference leads to significantly higher data volumes and presents website operators with new challenges.

Before the boom in generative AI, the proportion of automated access was around 20 percent, according to Prince. At that time, search engine crawlers like those from Google dominated the picture; there were only a few other legitimate applications and a few malicious bots. Today, however, the need for data from AI systems is growing almost unabated – and with it bot traffic. In order to keep pace with this development, new technical solutions are necessary. Prince spoke of “sandboxes”, i.e. temporary digital environments in which AI agents can complete tasks – such as planning a trip – and then be deleted again. In the future, millions of these could be created every second.

More power needed

The increasing data traffic is also putting the physical infrastructure of the Internet to the test. During the COVID-19 pandemic, usage of streaming services skyrocketed and pushed parts of the network to their limits. Unlike back then, however, growth today is continuous and without a foreseeable end. For companies like Cloudflare, this development also opens up new business opportunities.

With services to secure and accelerate websites as well as protection against overload attacks, the company is positioning itself as an important player in the new AI-driven Internet landscape. Prince sees the development as a fundamental change: Similar to the transition from desktop to smartphone, AI marks a new platform change.