7 Tech CEOs On How AI Will Shape Networking In 2025
The industry's most notable networking CEOs weighed in on the significant impact AI will have on the market and how their companies will harness AI in 2025.
Network growth in 2025 is expected to be significantly driven by increased investments in AI-powered infrastructure, with a major focus on supporting generative AI applications and services. This is going to lead to a substantial increase in spending on things like network security and connectivity, according to market research firm IDC.
But AI isn't just top of mind for customers and channel partners. Vendors have been introducing AI into their portfolios, with many networking companies injecting AI capabilities into various points throughout the network to simplify management and introduce more automation. With AI reaching a fever pitch in the technology space, it's a good thing that the industry's biggest companies are prioritizing innovation in 2025.
CEOs from networking stalwarts and startups alike shared their thoughts on how AI would impact the networking market in 2025 and how their companies are responding to the trend that's reshaping the space. Here's what the networking CEOs had to say. And check out CRN's CEO Outlook 2025 for more thoughts from these leaders and how they and their companies will be working the channel in 2025.
Amir Khan, CEO
Alkira
Alkira on-demand networking is already used by our customers to meet security and compliance requirements for AI applications. We offer a comprehensive and agile solution for providing contextual and private access to AI LLM services, which could be deployed in minutes.
In 2025, AI will have a transformative impact on our business and our partnerships. We expect AI to enhance our offerings, enabling more intelligent, efficient, and secure network management for our customers. AI will both power advanced networking capabilities to support AI workloads and leverage AI to optimize network operations. By integrating AI into our platform, we'll provide partners with tools to offer predictive maintenance, automated troubleshooting, and dynamic resource assessment. This will allow them to deliver more proactive and value-added services to their clients. AI-driven security features will be crucial, as we anticipate an increase in sophisticated, AI-powered cyber threats targeting critical infrastructure and enterprise networks.
We also foresee AI enabling more personalized and context-aware networking solutions. Our partners will be able to offer tailored network configurations that automatically adapt to specific business needs, improving performance and user experience. Additionally, AI will streamline operations, reducing complexity and allowing our partners to scale their services more efficiently.
Ultimately, AI will empower our partners to transition from traditional network management to becoming strategic advisors, helping their customers leverage intelligent network infrastructure to drive business innovation and growth. This shift will open up new revenue streams and strengthen the value proposition of our joint offerings.
Shlomo Kramer, Co-Founder and CEO
Cato Networks
While AI may seem new, we have been leveraging this technology in the Cato SASE Cloud Platform since we launched the product in 2016. For example, with Cato XDR, Cato uses custom-developed large language models (LLMs) to translate complex threat data into human-readable text for customer-specific reporting, such as a threat intelligence assessment. With Cato CASB, Cato uses AI/ML for complete application activity and metadata analysis. With Cato DLP, Cato uses proprietary AI models for data classification and data matching. With Cato SD-WAN, Cato applies AI to assess and improve network connectivity performance. In 2025, expect us to continue to expand our platform with new AI capabilities that our partners can deliver to customers.
Rajeev Shah, CEO and Co-Founder
Celona
I've thought about this a lot and had in-depth discussions with our customers and partners. Besides adding AI to our solution, it's important to understand that AI requires a completely different approach to architecting networks and applications, which creates new demands on enterprise networks. As AI shifts from training to implementation (AI inference), the need for powerful computing moves closer to the network edge and onto devices. This calls for a new AI-based edge model, which I call the industrial intelligence stack, where AI will greatly impact productivity and profitability. In two years, we'll move away from basic client-server models, replacing them with highly computational devices that need ultra-low latency and high-performance connectivity to apply AI insights and efficiencies in real-time. Our challenge, and the industry's challenge, is to create a new industrial wireless edge with practical yet significant advantages over other wireless technologies. The value extends beyond just our customers, and it has the potential to benefit the entire economy and society. We're building the foundation that will connect this stack, enabling AI and driving automation to make Industry 4.0 a reality.
Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO
Cisco Systems
The last 12 months have been profound in terms of AI acceleration and innovation, but again, I think we’re still in the early stages of adoption. A recent Cisco study showed that only 13 percent of organizations feel fully ready to leverage AI, a number that decreased from the same report last year. Customers are asking questions like ‘Is my infrastructure ready to support these new models;’ ‘How do I make sense of all my data,’ and ‘What kind of talent do I need to support my AI strategy?’ These challenges create a unique opportunity for Cisco and our partners to design and deliver highly personalized, predictive solutions, and managed services to address specific customer needs.
Cisco’s Partner Experience Platform is a great example of how we’re delivering those outcomes, giving partners access to real-time intelligence and automated, AI-generated recommendations for greater alignment to customer needs and our Cisco teams. AI will continue to be a catalyst for redefining how we create and capture value together in a rapidly evolving world, ultimately calling for a stronger, more collaborative partner ecosystem.
Ed Meyercord, President and CEO
Extreme Networks
AI will continue to have a transformative impact on our business and partners. We're going beyond the chatbot and AIOps. With Extreme AI Expert within Extreme Platform ONE, we'll deliver deep automation and flexibility and enable unprecedented efficiency in learning, planning, delivery, management and governance. By leaning into AI to drive automation and enablement, we'll dramatically reduce the time spent on complex tasks from hours to minutes. Again, no other vendor in our space can do this. Several of our partners have been testing Extreme AI Expert since we announced it in April, and the feedback has been phenomenal. They see the value of creating automation in networking and understand how it will help their customers dramatically reduce costs, boost innovation and gain a competitive advantage.
With AI, we're helping partners with enablement and training. For instance, if they want an example of a healthcare facility using fabric or Wi-Fi 6E and want to understand the technical blueprint or understand the ROI, they have the answer in a matter of seconds. Or perhaps they need a quick answer on how to configure a switch. They'll have it in seconds. This is saving them hours of work and gives them a significant advantage to sell Extreme. They'll always have AI by their side to make their jobs easier. We're also refreshing our training program to make it easier than ever to understand, configure, deploy or manage Extreme solutions. The days of spending months and years to become a certified network engineer are over. Enterprises need IT staff to be trained efficiently and quickly. We're going to solve that in a big way and completely reshape the industry.
Antonio Neri, President and CEO
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The testing and adoption of AI use cases in the enterprise market will continue to accelerate in 2025, and with our partners we will double down on our ability to educate and support our customers throughout their AI journey. With HPE Private Cloud AI, HPE and our partners provide customers with an easy on-ramp to enable the development and deployment of AI proofs of concept into production. Additionally, AI-powered operations and insights will dramatically simplify and automate infrastructure management across networking, compute, and storage. AI-powered operations, insights and observability within an IT stack and across hybrid and multi cloud is an opportunity to drive further innovation and we will continue developing new solutions and capabilities that will enable our customers and partners to capitalize on the use of AI for their IT Ops management.
Customers and partners will continue to explore AI use cases for their businesses, with an increasing pressure to move from experimentation to adoption. HPE and our partners are well positioned to help customers easily test proofs of concept and deploy them into production to solve this challenge. Our new turnkey HPE Private Cloud AI is a first-of-its-kind solution that provides deep integration with NVIDIA AI computing, networking and software with HPE's AI storage, compute, and the HPE GreenLake cloud. The offering enables enterprises of every size to gain an energy-efficient, fast, and flexible path for sustainably developing and deploying generative AI applications.
Pankaj Patel, CEO and Co-Founder
Nile
AI networking plays an integral role in our service delivery. Nile is unique in the industry in that we guarantee the reliability and performance of our wired and wireless network. Currently, we do that at 99.95 percent. This means that we guarantee that your availability, coverage, and capacity will collectively operate at the highest standards for our customers and partners. To make this work, you must be able to monitor your service closely and constantly. We have physical and virtual sensors that continuously monitor our service locally within each customer. Today, our AI is analyzing over 10TB of sensor data daily. That data informs our AI Automation Center on whether automatic tuning or fixes need to be deployed to maintain our service commitment.
This is just one example of how we're utilizing AI to deliver better overall experiences for our customers and partners. We use AI to aid in the initial design of the Nile service, to facilitate infrastructure software upgrades and security patching. We believe AI networking will be integral to the future of connectivity.
