IT is eager to adopt AI and almost 50% of network strategists believe increasing the use of analytics and AI will help enable the ideal network, according to a report by Cisco research

The report, which surveyed 2000 IT leaders and network strategists, found that organizations are moving their networks towards intent-based networking and investing in AI technologies.

In intent-based networking,  special software helps to plan, design and automatically implement on the fly changes to the network, improving its availability and agility, Cisco explained.

While the report found that only 4% of respondents believe their networks have moved beyond software-defined and are intent-based today, 35% believe their networks will be fully intent-based in two years’ time.

Meanwhile, almost 50% of network strategists believe increasing the use of analytics and AI will help enable the ideal network.

“AI will help IT break the cycle of maintaining the status quo. By embracing predictive analytics and AI-based operations, IT teams will pivot from being consumed with maintaining the status quo to becoming an enabler of new business innovation,” said Scott Harrell, the SVP and GM of Cisco Enterprise Networking.

Other key findings of the report show that almost 40 percent of IT leaders named maximizing IT’s business value as their number one priority, 41% of those surveyed claim to have at least one instance of SDN in at least one of their network domains, and 94% of respondents believe they will have a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) in two years.