Mandy Duncan
By the end of 2025, nearly half of South African CIOs—up from just 11% the year before—had made AI their top investment priority, marking a dramatic shift driven by mounting pressures on IT teams. As the skills gap widens and the intersection of cybersecurity, data privacy, and regulatory compliance intensifies, organisations face growing challenges in filling critical roles. Yet, the latest networking trends—powered by unprecedented investment in AI—are redefining what’s possible. By embracing innovation, IT leaders can not only counter today’s threats and resource constraints but also unlock new avenues for business growth and resilience.
Here are four essential networking trends that IT leaders should follow closely to stay ahead in 2026.
AIOps will matter more than the Wi-Fi standard
Enterprises will shift how they operate wireless networks this year. AIOps has been gaining traction in South African businesses and in 2026 it will become non-negotiable. Multi-link operation, wider channels, and deterministic latency will only reach their potential when AI takes over spectrum decisions humans can’t make fast enough. Continuous learning models will predict congestion, optimise radio frequency behaviour, and reshape channel usage in real time, making the traditional debates about SSIDs, “best band,” and manual tuning obsolete. Wired and wireless performance will converge not because speeds increase, but because AI will manage the experience as a single, intent-driven fabric.
Agentic AI turns LANs into proactive experience engines
South African organisations are laying robust data and infrastructure foundations to enable autonomous agents, setting the stage for self-driving networks. What’s changing isn’t the concept — it’s the maturity of agentic AI and cloud-delivered intelligence that can act on behalf of IT with confidence and speed. Local area networks won’t simply “heal themselves”; they’ll proactively optimise user experiences. Embedded AI agents in switches and access points will interpret behaviour patterns, anticipate service needs and take corrective action before a person ever feels a slowdown. This isn’t about the network adapting to users in real time — it’s about predicting impact minutes or hours ahead. For example, hardware return merchandise authorisations (RMAs) will happen automatically. AI will detect degradation, validate the fault, file the case and initiate a replacement shipment before the user or admin even knew something was wrong.
Full-stack convergence becomes the default
Local IT teams are increasingly weighed down by operational complexity, dedicating substantial resources to resolving issues within intricate networking environments. As organisations prepare for the year ahead, enterprise product strategies are set to transform, with a decisive shift away from fragmented networking solutions.
The next wave of modernisation will be driven by a desire for one operational framework across wired, wireless, wide area networks and ultimately compute and storage. Cloud-delivered orchestration and AI-native automation will push IT leaders to expect a single source of truth—and a single intelligence layer—that manages performance, experience, security and lifecycle from the client to the cloud.
This shift won’t be limited to networking. As platforms like OpsRamp bring observability and operations together across servers, storage and applications, organisations will demand the same unified approach for connectivity. The value won’t come from individual products outperforming competitors but will instead come from how seamlessly they operate as a full-stack system under common AI governance.
In 2026, the winning architectures will be those that behave like one organism, not a collection of parts. AI will unify them; cloud will deliver them; and enterprises will choose vendors based on who can make the full stack operate as a single experience.
The great network talent shift
Looking ahead, the AI talent shift won’t be about replacing engineers—it will be about elevating them—especially as South Africa’s persistent skills shortage continues to challenge IT teams. With conversational AI copilots and agentic assistants becoming embedded members of the IT team, the traditional workflows of dashboard-hopping, manual triage and endless ticket queues will fade. GenAI accuracy and functionality have reached a tipping point, and AI will manage the first line of support: answering routine questions, resolving policy conflicts, identifying anomalies and even auto-initiating RMAs.
The next generation of experts won’t just configure networks but will partner with AI copilots to manage thousands of endpoints with the precision of one. Engineers won’t spend their time navigating dashboards; AI will surface insights, take action and guide decisions through natural language interactions. The most effective professionals will be those who not only know how to configure but also know how to teach and collaborate with AI: shaping prompts, validating intent and orchestrating automation at scale. Moving forward, the network engineer becomes a strategist, and AI becomes the operational backbone.
By harnessing AI-powered networks and unified architectures in 2026, South African IT leaders can transform operational complexity into strategic advantage. These innovations will not only bridge persistent skills gaps and strengthen workflows but also empower teams to focus on driving growth and innovation in a rapidly evolving digital era.
Mandy Duncan, Country Manager of HPE Aruba Networking South Africa. She writes in her personal capacity.
