Artificial intelligence helps solve

networking problems
Management, SD-WAN, SASE, and 5G can benefit from AI that
can enable or lighten enterprise-networking tasks.
With the public release of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s $10-billion investment into OpenAI, artificial
intelligence (AI) is quickly gaining mainstream acceptance. For enterprise networking
professionals, this means there is a very real possibility that AI traffic will affect their networks
in major ways, both positive and negative.

As AI becomes a core feature in mission-critical software, how should network teams and
networking professionals adjust to stay ahead of the trend?

Andrew Coward, GM of Software Defined Networking at IBM, argues that the enterprise has
already lost control of its networks. The shift to the cloud has left the traditional enterprise
network stranded, and AI and automation are required if enterprises hope to regain control.

“The center of gravity has shifted from the corporate data center to a hybrid multicloud
environment, but the network was designed for a world where all traffic still flows to the data
center. This means that many of the network elements that dictate traffic flow and policy are
now beyond the reach and control of the enterprise’s networking teams,” Coward said.

Recent research from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) supports Coward’s

observations. According to EMA’s 2022 Network Management Megatrends report, while 99%
of enterprises have adopted at least one public-cloud service and 72% have a multicloud
strategy, only 18% of the 400 IT organizations surveyed believed that their existing tools are
effective at monitoring public clouds.

AI can help monitor networks.

AI is stressing networks in both obvious and nonobvious ways. It’s no secret that organizations that
use cloud-based AI tools, such as OpenAI, IBM Watson, or AWS DeepLens, must accommodate
heavy traffic between cloud and enterprise data centers to train the tools. Training AI and keeping it
current requires shuttling massive amounts of data back and forth.
What’s less obvious is that AI enters the enterprise through side doors, sneaking in through
capabilities built into other tools. AI adds intelligence to everything from content creation tools to
anti-spam engines to video surveillance software to edge devices, and many of those tools
constantly communicate over the WAN to enterprise data centers. This can create traffic surges and
latency issues, among a range of other problems.

On the positive side of the ledger, AI-powered traffic-management and monitoring tools are starting
to help resource-constrained network teams cope with the complexity and fragility of multi-cloud,
distributed networks. At the same time, modern network services such as SD-WAN, SASE, and 5G
also now rely on AI for such things as intelligent routing, load balancing, and network slicing.

But as AI takes over more network functions, is it wise for enterprise leaders to trust this
technology?

Is it wise to trust AI for mission-critical networking?

The professionals who will be tasked with using AI to enable next-generation networking are
understandably skeptical of the many overheated claims of AI vendors.

“Network operations manage what many perceive to be a complex, fragile environment. So,
many teams are fearful of using AI to drive decision-making because of potential network
disruptions,” said Jason Normandin, a netops product manager for Broadcom Software.

Operation teams that don’t understand or have access to the underlying AI model’s logic will
be hard to win over. “To ensure buy-in from network operations teams, it is critical to keep
human oversight over the AI-enabled devices and systems,” Normandin said.

To trust AI, networking professionals require “explainable AI,” or AI that is not a black box but
that reveals its inner workings. “Building trust in AI as a reliable companion starts with
understanding its capabilities and limitations and testing it in a controlled environment before
deployment,” said Dr. Adnan Masood, Chief AI Architect at digital transformation company
UST.

Explainable and interpretable AI allows network teams to understand how AI arrives at its
decisions, while key metrics allow network teams to track its performance. “Continuously
monitoring AI’s performance and gathering feedback from team members is also an important
way to build trust,” Masood added. “Trust in AI is not about blind-faith but rather
understanding its capabilities and using it as a valuable tool to enhance your team’s
performance.”
Broadcom’s Normandin notes that while networking experts may be reluctant to “give up the
wheel” to AI, there is a middle way. “Recommendation engines can be a good compromise
between manual and fully automated systems,” he said. “Such solutions let human experts
ultimately make decisions of their own while offering users to rate recommendations provided.
This approach enables a continuous training feedback loop, giving the opportunity to
dynamically improve the models by using operators’ input.”

AI can assist network support with natural-language

chat.
As enterprise networks become more complicated, distributed, and congested, AI is helping
resource-strapped network teams keep up. “The need for instantaneous, elastic connectivity
across the enterprise is no longer just an option; it is table stakes for a successful business,”
Coward from IBM said. “That’s why the industry is looking to apply AI and intelligent
automation solutions to the network.”

The fact is that AI-powered tools are already spreading throughout cloud and enterprise
networks, and the number of tools that feature AI will continue to rise for the foreseeable future.
Enterprise networking has been one of the sectors most aggressively adopting AI and
automation. AI is currently being used for a wide range of network functions, including
performance monitoring, alarm suppression, root-cause analysis, and anomaly detection.

AI is also being used to improve customer experiences. “AI’s ability to adapt and learn the
client-to-cloud connection as it changes will make AI ideal for the most dynamic network use
cases,” said Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer at Juniper Networks. Friday said that as society
becomes more mobile, the wireless user experience gets ever more complex. That’s a problem
because wireless networks are now critical to the daily lives of employees, especially in the age
of work-from-home, which forces IT to support users in environments over which IT has little to
no control.

This is why AI-powered support is one of the most popular early use cases.

“AI is enabling the next era of search and chatbots,” Friday said. “The end goal is an
environment where users enjoy steady, consistent performance and no longer need to spend
precious IT resources on mountains of support tickets.”

Chatbots and virtual assistants built with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural
Language Understanding (NLU) can understand questions that users ask in their own words.
The system responds with specific insights and recommendations based on observations
made across the LAN, WLAN, and WAN.
Where this client-to-cloud insight and automation simply was not possible just a few years ago,
today’s chatbots can utilize NLP capabilities to provide context and meaning to user inputs,
allowing AI to come up with the best response,” Friday said. “This far surpasses the simple
‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses that originally came from traditional chatbots. With better NLP
capabilities, chatbots can progress to become more intuitive, to the point where users will have
a hard time telling the difference between a bot and a human.”

The early stages of this vision are already underway. AI is currently being used to help Fortune
500 companies accomplish such things as managing end-to-end user connectivity and
enabling the delivery of new 5G services.

How IT pros should prepare for AI.

As AI, machine learning, and automation power an increasing array of networking software and
gear, how should individual network professionals prepare to deal with their new artificial
colleagues?

While few professionals will miss the mundane, repetitive chores that AI excels at, many also
worry that AI will eventually displace them entirely.

“While AI is developing exponentially, it is inevitable network teams will be exposed to

AI-enabled devices and systems,” Broadcom’s Normandin said. “As network experts are not
meant to become AI specialists, a cultural change is probably more likely to happen than
anything else.”

Masood of UST agrees that a cultural change is in order. “Network teams are rapidly evolving
from just managing networks to managing networks with a brain,” he said. “Within the context
of networking, these teams will need to develop the ability to work collaboratively with data
scientists, software engineers, and other experts to build, deploy, and maintain AI systems in
production.”

Network professionals will need to level-up existing skills in network management and
optimization so they can accomplish such tasks as using machine-learning algorithms to
predict network congestion and to improve network performance. They will also need to
develop new skills in data analysis and visualization, NLP, outlier analysis, anomaly detection,
and optimization algorithms. “I am not suggesting they become an AI developer or a data
scientist,” Masood said, “but deeper understanding of the underlying algorithms and statistical
models used to build networking specific AI systems will definitely give them a competitive
edge over their non-AI-literate counterparts.”
Normandin said that a new role, NetDevOps, will emerge to manage AI-orchestrated networks.
“Successful NetDevOps initiatives will look like fully automated environments that can deploy
changes across networks, ready to be consumed in a DevOps approach all along the
[continuous integration/continuous delivery] pipeline,” he said.

Programmable, software-defined, and cloud-based network environments have made

NetDevOps possible through infrastructure-as-code and automation. “Now, network
operations teams have to make their Agile revolution and accept the risk of more frequent
changes and more automation,” Normandin said. “As a consequence, they’ll need to refocus
on the main outcome: monitoring and guaranteeing the digital experience delivered by the
networks.”