AI bots will surpass human users on the internet by 2027, estimates Matthew Prince, CEO of web infrastructure company Cloudflare.
According to Prince, a historic change is occurring in web traffic, driven particularly by the rapid proliferation of generative AI - such as ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. This change affects both online services and who will use the internet in the future, and how.
Matthew Prince spoke about the phenomenon at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. According to him, about a fifth of internet traffic was long generated by bots, but with the advent of generative AI, the proportion of bots has begun to grow sharply. One reason for this is the operating method of AI agents: when a human shops or plans a trip, they visit a few websites, but an AI bot can easily search for information from thousands of sites in the same amount of time. As a result, a single AI agent can generate many times more web traffic compared to a human.
AI bots are also not limited to search engines or simple automated tasks. New generation AI agents perform complex tasks independently on behalf of users - comparing products, planning holidays, and compiling information from multiple sources. This significantly increases so-called agent-based traffic, which burdens the internet's underlying infrastructure, servers, and security services.
Cloudflare's leader also warned that the growth of AI traffic requires a new kind of infrastructure. In the future, so-called sandboxes may be needed - temporary, rapidly launching and shutting down environments where AI agents can operate safely and efficiently. Prince described a situation where millions of such environments are created and dismantled in fractions of a second, as user requests generate new agents to perform tasks online.
The technological disruption also affects the internet's business models. Traditionally, the monetization logic of websites has been based on advertisements and increasing visitor numbers. Prince speculates that local and high-quality content may, however, gain value, as AI systems require quality data, for which they may be willing to pay in the future, for example, in the form of licensing fees. But before that, we might see massive destruction as ad-funded websites disappear from the internet entirely.
Although the growth has been steady rather than sudden, like the spike in web traffic seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, Prince emphasizes that there is no end in sight for this development. According to him, the next phase of the internet depends both on technological development and on how the value of services and content is distributed among different actors - that is, what will be the business model of the future internet when most of its users are bots?
Matthew Prince's full interview video below:
Matthew Prince spoke about the phenomenon at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. According to him, about a fifth of internet traffic was long generated by bots, but with the advent of generative AI, the proportion of bots has begun to grow sharply. One reason for this is the operating method of AI agents: when a human shops or plans a trip, they visit a few websites, but an AI bot can easily search for information from thousands of sites in the same amount of time. As a result, a single AI agent can generate many times more web traffic compared to a human.
AI bots are also not limited to search engines or simple automated tasks. New generation AI agents perform complex tasks independently on behalf of users - comparing products, planning holidays, and compiling information from multiple sources. This significantly increases so-called agent-based traffic, which burdens the internet's underlying infrastructure, servers, and security services.
Cloudflare's leader also warned that the growth of AI traffic requires a new kind of infrastructure. In the future, so-called sandboxes may be needed - temporary, rapidly launching and shutting down environments where AI agents can operate safely and efficiently. Prince described a situation where millions of such environments are created and dismantled in fractions of a second, as user requests generate new agents to perform tasks online.
The technological disruption also affects the internet's business models. Traditionally, the monetization logic of websites has been based on advertisements and increasing visitor numbers. Prince speculates that local and high-quality content may, however, gain value, as AI systems require quality data, for which they may be willing to pay in the future, for example, in the form of licensing fees. But before that, we might see massive destruction as ad-funded websites disappear from the internet entirely.
Although the growth has been steady rather than sudden, like the spike in web traffic seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, Prince emphasizes that there is no end in sight for this development. According to him, the next phase of the internet depends both on technological development and on how the value of services and content is distributed among different actors - that is, what will be the business model of the future internet when most of its users are bots?
Matthew Prince's full interview video below:
