Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated that bots are taking over the internet. In an interview at this week's SXSW conference in Austin, he said that with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, AI bot traffic is expected to exceed human traffic on the internet by 2027.
Prince explained that as generative AI technology develops, the web traffic generated by bots continues to rise. This is because bots can access vast numbers of websites to gather answers for user chatbot queries.
"If a human is doing a task—for example, if you want to buy a digital camera—you might visit five websites. The intelligent agent or bot serving you will often visit 1,000 times more sites than a human would," Prince said. "That means it might browse 5,000 websites. This is real traffic, and it creates a real load that everyone will have to deal with and account for."
Prince noted that before the generative AI era, only about 20% of internet traffic came from bots, with Google's web crawlers being the largest among them. One-fifth of the world's websites use services from his company, a network infrastructure and security firm. However, aside from some legitimate crawlers, most other bots are used by scammers and malicious actors.
"With the rise of generative AI and its nearly limitless appetite for data, we are seeing bot traffic continue to grow. We predict that by 2027, internet bot traffic will surpass human traffic," Prince stated.
The executive also pointed out that this shift in internet usage will drive the development of new technologies, such as sandbox environments built specifically for AI agents. These environments can be quickly activated and destroyed once a task is completed. Such technology will be useful when users delegate specific tasks, like planning a trip, to an AI agent.
"What we are thinking about is how to build the underlying infrastructure so that people can launch new code as easily as opening a new tab in a browser, then run it and serve various intelligent agents," Prince added.
Comments