EXTREME NETWORKS
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It’ s well documented that AI agents are moving from experimentation into daily business operations. But as they do, questions are mounting over cost, organisational structure and whether corporate networks can cope with the traffic they generate. In 2024, consulting giant Gartner forecasted that a fifth of organisations would use AI agents to halve middle management roles by 2026. While that timeline has not quite materialised, the underlying pressure on management structures is real.
Markus Nispel, Head of AI Engineering and EMEA CTO at Extreme Networks, contends that predicting AI’ s impact remains difficult this early in its widespread adoption.
“ With AI in general, we are still really early in the cycle, so I’ m not sure whether most people can make accurate predictions around the impact of AI,” he says.“ If you think about AI as a general-purpose technology, like electricity or the steam engine, early on in those cycles it was really unclear how things were going to evolve.”
EXTREME NETWORKS
HEADQUARTERS: MORRISVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA, US
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 4,400( 2023) MARKET CAP: US $ 2.9BN NUMBER OF COUNTRIES: 80 +
Breaking down silos Rather than headcount reduction, Markus argues the more pressing shift is structural. Businesses now need to flatten hierarchies and break down departmental silos to achieve real value from AI.
Markus uses the example of a retailer wanting to improve customer experience, with store operations, supply chain and delivery all needing to be connected through a shared AI system for that improvement to happen.
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