Miscellanea

1. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

# AI Traffic Could Surpass Human Activity by 2027

The internet is on the brink of a fundamental transformation. In a speech at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that traffic generated by AI-powered bots could overtake human online activity as early as 2027. Prince described generative AI as having an “insatiable need for data,” driving automated agents to browse websites at a scale humans could never match. From shopping and research to content generation, these bots are already reshaping the digital landscape, creating real load on servers and networks worldwide.

Prince drew a sharp contrast between human and bot behaviour. A typical human shopping for a digital camera might visit just five websites. An AI agent performing the same task, however, could scan 1,000 times more—potentially 5,000 sites—in seconds. “That’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account,” Prince said. Before the generative AI boom, bots accounted for roughly 20% of global internet traffic, mostly from legitimate sources like search-engine crawlers. Malicious bots existed, but they were a minority. Now, the explosion of AI tools has flipped the script.

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