Jakarta, INTI - Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, predicts that bot traffic will surpass human activity on the internet by 2027, driven by the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Bot Surge Fueled by Generative AI
The prediction was shared during the SXSW conference in Austin, United States.
Prince explained that the rise in bot activity is largely due to generative AI’s massive data demands.
“If a human performs a task, say, shopping for a digital camera, you might visit five websites. Your agent or bot, however, will often visit a thousand times more sites than a human would,” he noted.
He added that a single user request can prompt bots to crawl thousands of sites to gather the necessary information.
New Internet Infrastructure Demands and Challenges
Before the generative AI era, roughly 20 percent of internet traffic came from bots.
Now, that share is growing, including traffic from bots involved in illicit activities such as cyber fraud.
“With the rise of generative AI and its insatiable need for data, we anticipate that by 2027, online bot traffic will exceed human internet traffic,” Prince said.
He noted that this shift will drive demand for new technologies, such as AI agent sandboxes, and require substantial infrastructure, including additional data centers and servers.
Prince emphasized that this change is part of the natural evolution of the internet, comparable to the transition from personal computers to smartphones.
Conclusion
The rapid rise of generative AI is transforming internet traffic dynamics, with bot activity projected to surpass human activity by 2027. This shift highlights both opportunities and challenges for digital infrastructure, from expanding data centers to developing new technologies for AI management. The trend marks a pivotal evolution in how the internet operates, signaling a need for adaptation across industries and platforms.
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