- Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert predicts machine-generated traffic could outnumber humans by a 1,000 times in the next five years
- The answer to this, Seifert believes, is to ensure servers are efficient enough to handle demand
- Cloudflare previously predicted machines would outnumber humans in 2027, but this digital soothsaying was 12 months out
Machine-generated internet traffic is already outnumbering that by humans, and it shows no sign of declining, experts have warned.
Cloudflare Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert has predicted man-made activity will be dwarfed by bots and agentic applications, with such machine traffic could be 1,000 times more than human traffic within the next five years.
However, Seifert was at pains to mention he has form for getting these predictions wrong.
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The “rounding error” online
However, right or wrong, human traffic is already outnumbered by bots online, which means measures have to be taken for the internet to remain useful to people, or else grind to a halt under the weight of automated traffic.
Cloudflare believes making efficiencies is the solution, but those optimizations may be something other companies need to focus on.
While we may feel that the internet exists for humans to communicate and shop or spend money on a service, the truth is that it is increasingly dominated by machine-generated traffic. Traditional bots have been replaced with agentic AI and other automated tools, and every request has an impact on servers (and the rest of the internet infrastructure).
Cloudflare’s role in providing cloud services that provide security, performance, and general infrastructure is key to overseeing the traffic, with many websites relying on its protective shield to improve load times and mitigate online threats.
Explaining the thinking behind the predicted increase, Seifert said on a recent Cloudflare earnings call: “To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic.”
“In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.”
Efficiency questions
Just how can servers and infrastructure be more efficient? Will this efficiency focus on human or machine generated and agentic transactions?
Some solutions are intelligent traffic management, optimized protocols, hardware acceleration, and edge computing.
Discussions in Cloudflare’s earnings call pointed at where the greatest efficiencies may be made – in its competitors, where GPU utilization is “super low,” due to them “buying a server and then trying to sell it back, lease it back” and putting the onus on the customer to “get as much out of the server as possible.”
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