South Africa’s AI-ready network infrastructure could unlock growth, savings and resilience, says new Cisco research.
If you want to know how serious South Africa is about the AI future, start by looking under the hood — at the network. According to Cisco’s latest enterprise networking research, 100% of surveyed South African IT leaders agree: AI-ready network infrastructure is mission-critical to deploying the tools of tomorrow. And if we don’t get it right, we risk more than just dropped Zoom calls — we risk economic stagnation, security failures and innovation dead ends.
The report highlights a dramatic pivot underway: networks are no longer passive plumbing but central to value creation. In an era of AI assistants, real-time personalisation, and hyperconnected workloads, legacy systems are simply not up to the task. Congestion, cyberattacks and misconfigurations are already costing global businesses $160 billion a year. Add AI into the mix, and that burden could either double — or disappear, depending on whether companies act now.
This isn’t just about tech upgrades. It’s about survival. Cisco’s data reveals that 97% of South African IT leaders have experienced major outages, and nearly all are now planning to expand infrastructure capacity — whether on-premise, in the cloud, or both. But modernisation isn’t just defensive. There’s a serious upside: 90% of leaders believe improved networks will drive revenue, while 95% expect meaningful cost savings through smarter operations and fewer outages.
“Today’s IT leaders recognise that the networks they establish today will become the digital nervous system of their organisations,” said Smangele Nkosi, GM of Cisco South Africa.
And yet, for all the optimism, most South African networks aren’t AI-ready. Just 50% of organisations have deployed intelligent features like segmentation, visibility and autonomous control. There’s still too much manual oversight, too many incomplete deployments, and too many siloes. This isn’t unique to South Africa — but it’s particularly urgent here, where connectivity gaps, load-shedding and cyberthreats amplify the consequences of failure.
In this context, Cisco’s push for “AI-powered, secure, adaptive” networking isn’t hype — it’s a call to action. And the infrastructure conversation is already reshaping the C-suite. With 78% of CEOs relying on CIOs and CTOs to lead AI investment decisions, the network has officially entered boardroom territory.
We’ve said it before when writing about South Africa’s below-average cybersecurity readiness — upgrading the network on its own isn’t enough. Without digital resilience and clear governance, modernisation risks becoming just another line item, not a real advantage.
Still, the shift is clear: if South Africa wants to lead in the AI era, it must stop treating networking as background architecture and start seeing it as strategy. The alternative? Slow apps, dark data, and missed opportunity.