Nvidia Corp.‘s latest networking innovations meet the needs of a new kind of network that supports the unique demands of artificial intelligence factories. Ethernet is no longer a generic plumbing choice but an enabler of high-performance AI. With today’s unveiling of Multipath Reliable Connection, or MRC, on Spectrum-X Ethernet, Nvidia is pushing Ethernet even deeper into AI-native territory — and doing so in partnership with OpenAI Group PBC and Microsoft Corp.
Extreme Networks Inc. used its Extreme Connect 2026 user conference this week to make a strong case that artificial intelligence-driven networking has finally arrived. Building on Platform ONE, the company rolled out a full-stack vision spanning new Wi-Fi 7 access points, enhanced fabric-ready switching and a second-generation artificial intelligence layer called Agent ONE, designed to act less like a chatbot and more like an operational co-worker for NetOps teams.
Customer experience used to be something tuned at the edges. Better call center scripts, nicer portals, lower prices or a new survey could make incremental improvements in consumers’ perceptions of a brand. Today, it starts much earlier because every interaction across the channels customers use every day matters. Text, voice and messaging are no longer just “pipes” for getting a message from point A to point B. They’re now the primary mechanism through which trust is built or eroded in seconds.
Major League Baseball opened the 2026 season with a technological first: the Automated Ball-Strike or ABS Challenge System, powered by T-Mobile’s private 5G network, is now deployed across all 29 U.S. ballparks. While headlines focus on umpire challenges and strike zones, the real story for information technology professionals lies beneath the surface — in the network infrastructure that enables split-second decisions in environments where failure simply isn’t an option.
It has been just under a decade since Amazon Web Services Inc. launched Amazon Connect, taking its own internal contact center-as-a-service solution and commercialized it. At the time, there were many doubts about whether it could succeed in a mature market with several established vendors. The company loaded Connect up with artificial intelligence features long before AI was cool, and a unique utilization-based pricing model to disrupt, and it rapidly gained traction.