Last month, Cisco released its State of Wireless Report, revealing Wi-Fi’s limitations for companies who are now expanding their use of AI. The report outlined a discrepancy between companies’ ambitious AI plans and their reliance on aging Wi-Fi standards from before the current AI era. Other highlights include an uptick in AI-driven cyberattacks targeting wireless networks, while AI workloads are booming in enterprise networks—with 28 percent of respondents running AI today, forecast to increase to more than three-quarters by 2027.Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), according to the report, is the most widely used Wi-Fi standard today (at 43 percent of respondents). But Wi-Fi 5 is also an old standard, first released in 2013. Meanwhile, the report notes, less than one-fifth of organizations have upgraded their wireless networks to any Wi-Fi standard released during the present decade. (Wi-Fi 6E was first released in 2021, while Wi-Fi 7, the current standard, came out in 2024.)Wi-Fi 5 only offers speeds of up to 3.5 gigabits per second, which doesn’t cut it in a streaming and AI world. The 13-year-old standard often can’t handle high-bandwidth and low-latency needs, especially in device-dense environments. “As the demands on the network increase, Wi-Fi 5 will become more costly to operate,” said Matthew MacPherson, enterprise wireless CTO at Cisco. “Administrators will spend more time reacting and troubleshooting and less time proactively applying the tools required for better experience, optimized productivity, and improved security.”How Wi-Fi Learned to Handle AI Traffic Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax, introduced in 2019) split its signals into lanes, letting many devices receive data simultaneously. This technology is called orthogonal frequency division multiple access, or OFDMA. “Wi-Fi 6 was a necessary shift to improve efficiency,” said MacPherson. “But it was not originally designed for the complex, high-bandwidth traffic patterns that AI is now driving as AI workloads generate significantly more device-to-network data.”Wi-Fi 6E (Extended) addressed some of these shortcomings. It unlocked the 6-gigahertz band, offering dozens of additional data channels. Although Wi-Fi 6 and 6E both support speeds up to 9.6 Gb/s, 6E’s use of the 6-GHz band makes it better suited for high-bandwidth tasks, especially in crowded areas. Wi-Fi 6E’s enhancements, the report found, are especially popular with those aggressively developing artificial intelligence capabilities. Organizations already using 6 GHz show almost double the rate of AI applications and workloads (45 percent) compared to nonadopters (26 percent).“The 6-GHz band supplies the bandwidth required by AI-powered applications and correlates with improved scalability,” said MacPherson. With Wi-Fi 7, introduced in 2024, came a host of new expansions and improvements. The most recent Wi-Fi protocol introduced the capability for each device to use multiple Wi-Fi bands simultaneously, called Multi-Link Operation or MLO. In part because of MLO, the new standard improved efficiency and connection stability. Wider 320-megahertz channels and more efficient use of the 6-GHz spectrum also meant more stable, lower-latency performance.“Access to uncongested 6-GHz spectrum around the world is critical to unlocking Wi-Fi 7’s potential,” said Gaurav Jain, vice president of technology at the Wi-Fi Alliance, based in Austin, Texas.Cisco expects Wi-Fi 6 usage to continue growing as it becomes the new baseline, but Wi-Fi 7 is expected to take the lion’s share of new enterprise deployments over the next two years as the equipment ecosystem matures.Wi-Fi 8 Will Put AI at the Radio EdgeTo further address growing compute densities and complement AI’s expanding capabilities, the Wi-Fi Alliance is coordinating industry work on Wi-Fi 8. Although it won’t be broadly released until late next year or sometime in 2028, the next Wi-Fi standard promises to add additional AI-friendly features.“While Wi-Fi 7 provides the tools to manage predictability and policy, Wi-Fi 8 will add more network-level fluidity and local processing power for AI,” MacPherson said.Wi-Fi 8’s new features will include a dynamic capability to serve the most urgent traffic among a channel’s access points (APs). This multi-AP coordination (MAPC) capability will enable the wireless network to optimize spectrum and resources in real time.“Wi-Fi 8 extends connection stability to the network level, enabling seamless roaming without any hit to the client,” said MacPherson. “It will bring the network-level fluidity and more local processing power.”A major engineering shift accompanies Wi-Fi 8 as well. Silicon manufacturers are integrating AI inference engines into their chips to accommodate Wi-Fi 8. (Broadcom unveiled the first such chip in late 2025, ahead of the standard’s formal certification.)This will allow AI inference—tasks like anomaly detection, spectrum optimization, and traffic prioritization—to run locally on the access point itself, without a round trip to the cloud.The urgency is compounded by a dynamic the Cisco report calls the “wireless AI paradox”: the same AI transformation driving demand for better Wi-Fi is also generating cyberattacks that could exploit it. Better wireless infrastructure, in other words, is no longer just about bandwidth. It’s about building networks smart enough to defend themselves.