Without a secure, more scalable Wi-Fi backbone, organizations can’t deliver on the opportunities afforded by AI and other technologies, warns Cisco. The vendor just published its inaugural State of Wireless 2026 report, which surveyed more than 6,000 global wireless professionals.
IT teams in charge of wireless networks are under pressure to rapidly evolve the infrastructure, driven by issues including the growth of AI and other high-bandwidth applications, an influx of new devices, and a wide range of users and devices, from employees and contractors to autonomous robots and smart sensors. New AI-powered use cases are appearing daily, and IT teams are challenged to deal with rising wireless complexity.
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“AI is currently the sword and the shield: it’s simultaneously driving unprecedented ROI while exposing the vulnerabilities in legacy systems,” wrote Aruna Ravichandran, Cisco senior vice president of product marketing for networking and CMO for collaboration, in a blog post about the study.
“While Wi-Fi 5 remains the most common standard, it is increasingly unable to support the demands of the AI era. But the market is reacting. We are seeing a shift as organizations move beyond legacy limitations, with three in five enterprises planning to deploy Wi-Fi 6E or 7 within the next year to help bridge the gap,” Ravichandran wrote.
“This has created an architectural breaking point. We’ve entered an era where high-bandwidth AI workloads collide with an increasingly high number of IoT and connected devices, all competing for the same limited bandwidth,” Ravichandran wrote. “From 4K/8K streaming and AR/VR to critical OT sensors, this massive influx of endpoints cannot be supported sufficiently on a legacy backbone. It contributes to a perfect storm of operational complexity and security risk that yesterday’s infrastructure was not built to handle.”
According to Cisco’s data, Wi-Fi 5 is still the most widely deployed Wi-Fi standard, used by 43% of surveyed organizations. Some 19% of organizations are presently deploying Wi-Fi 6E or 7, while 59% plan to deploy Wi-Fi 6E or 7 in the next year, the study found.
Additionally, 28% of organizations surveyed have already deployed AI workloads, and that percentage is estimated to climb to 79% by 2027. Some 29% will be in pilot stage, and 22% are planning deployment over the next 12 months.
“This rapid trajectory further highlights that AI deployment is indeed the defining use case for next-generation wireless infrastructure,” the Cisco study asserted.
“While core use cases such as wireless for physical security are already widely deployed, the next phase of wireless growth is being driven by emerging applications that depend on high-performing, resilient networks. Organizations are increasingly piloting or planning wireless investments to support autonomous systems and robotics, smart facilities and energy management, space analytics, and immersive collaboration,” the study found.
The 6 GHz opportunity
One wireless advancement that is being used to handle AI and other capacity challenges is the addition of the 6 GHz band added by Wi-Fi 6E, “and utilization further improved with Wi-Fi 7,” Cisco stated. “Organizations are using it to solve capacity and congestion issues (46%), enable high-bandwidth applications (32%), and support AI workloads (31%). And the research shows that those adopting this added spectrum are seeing strong benefits.”
“Organizations already deploying 6 GHz show almost double the rate of AI applications and workloads (45%) compared to non-adopters (26%),” the study reported.
“It’s no surprise that Cisco telemetry highlights a 60% increase in 6 GHz clients went live in 2025. Wireless professionals are seeing the 6 GHz opportunity and are helping their organizations,” the study found.
Operational complexity barrier
General network complexity is the number one challenge facing IT teams, the study stated.
“Nearly every wireless leader (98%) reports that wireless operations are becoming more complex, creating a reactive posture that drains resources, prevents strategic work, and directly undermines the AI initiatives that help reduce complexity,” the report found. “This creates a vicious cycle: complexity drives reactive work, reactive work limits modernization, and delayed modernization perpetuates complexity.”
“Organizations cite three primary drivers of this growing complexity: mission‑critical workloads, increasingly including AI‑driven applications (43%), the need to mitigate new security risks (42%), and rising bandwidth demands from new use cases (38%).”
“This complexity translates into tangible operational strain. Nearly half of respondents (43%) report that their team receives at least 50 wireless support tickets a week, with the average standing at 68. This means IT teams are spending hundreds of hours per month managing wireless tickets,” the report stated.
“Wireless leaders expect this burden to compound. Nearly two-thirds (64%) expect ticket resolution times to increase over the next two to three years, suggesting a growing need to address this complexity.”
More takeaways from Cisco’s State of Wireless 2026
Some other key findings of the Cisco report include:
- Wireless budgets are growing. “Eight in 10 organizations increased wireless investment over the past five years, with 29% implementing significant budgetary increases of 50% or more. What’s more, 82% forecast that wireless budgets will continue to rise, with over a third (35%) expecting investment increases of 50% or more over the next four to five years.”
- AI-generated attacks drive increased wireless security risk. “Over half of organizations (58%) have experienced financial losses from wireless security incidents, with 50% of them exceeding US$1 million annually. Over a third (36%) of affected organizations report compromised IoT or OT devices as the culprit, representing a substantial threat to Wi-Fi as the most common connectivity technology for IoT.”
- Wireless threats are on the rise. “Organizations cannot confidently deploy Wi-Fi as a platform for business-critical workloads while facing escalating security threats and mounting financial losses,” the report states. “Eighty-five percent of organizations have experienced at least one wireless security incident in the last 12 months. Further to this, more than one-third report experiencing escalating wireless threats over the past two years (38%). Wireless leaders state that security threats have become more frequent and damaging, while also being more difficult to detect and remedy.”
- A lack of visibility compounds operational challenges. “Nearly 9 in 10 organizations (87%) report visibility gaps that impair their ability to troubleshoot Wi-Fi issues effectively. The top three frequently reported challenges are poor client visibility, application and cloud visibility, and packet visibility,” the report states. “Without end-to-end visibility, teams cannot rapidly isolate problems. This creates a particularly dangerous dynamic: wireless networks become scapegoats for problems originating elsewhere. A quarter of complaints (25%) are inaccurately attributed to wireless, with each misattributed incident wasting an average of 18 hours across teams. The true culprits are most commonly application problems (25%), client or endpoint issues (22%), and cloud or external service failures (18%).”
- The attack surface continues to expand. “Over a third of affected organizations (36%) report disruption from compromised IoT or OT devices, representing a substantial threat to Wi-Fi since it’s the most common connectivity technology for IoT. The proliferation of IoT devices, especially when unmanaged, creates an aggregated vulnerability as individual weaknesses compound into network-wide exposure.”
- Eighty-six percent of organizations report challenges in hiring. “Talent shortages do not merely slow modernization, they directly amplify operational strain and security exposure while making it more difficult to implement AI for networking. This creates a vicious cycle: organizations lacking talent struggle to modernize, complexity and security risk escalate, costs rise, and the best talent leaves for more modern organizations.”
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