Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said artificial intelligence is driving a shift in how traffic moves across the internet, with AI bots on track to generate more activity than humans by 2027. Prince said bot traffic has expanded alongside generative AI as agents increasingly perform tasks on behalf of users, often at far greater scale. “If a human were doing a task…you might go to five websites,” he said. “Your agent…will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites.” That dynamic is already creating additional load across websites and infrastructure as automated systems query large volumes of data.
Prince described the change as a structural shift rather than a temporary increase in usage. “AI is another platform shift…the way that you’re going to consume information is completely different,” he said, comparing it to earlier transitions such as the move from desktop to mobile. He added that the rise in AI-driven traffic will require new systems, including environments that can be created and shut down on demand to support agent activity. “As easily as you open a new tab…you can spin up new code,” he said, pointing to the kind of infrastructure needed as AI agents become more common.
The scale of that activity could have broader implications for how the internet is built and managed. Prince noted that traffic has continued to grow without signs of slowing, and that supporting AI agents at scale will require additional investment in compute, data centers, and network capacity. For companies operating online, the shift suggests a future where a larger share of traffic is generated by machines, with implications for performance, cost, and control.