The share of internet traffic driven by human activity is shrinking rapidly, and non-human traffic could rise to 1,000 times the level of human traffic within the next five years, a forecast said.

On Aug. 10 local time, IT outlet TechRadar reported that Cloudflare Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert (토머스 사이퍼트) said at a recent earnings presentation that the spread of bots and agent-style applications is accelerating the shift.

The key point is that internet requests generated by machines have already outnumbered those made by people. As agent-style AI and various automation tools grow on top of existing automated bots, the burden on servers and network infrastructure is also increasing. Contrary to the idea of the internet as a space for human communication and consumption, the actual structure of traffic is increasingly being reorganised around machines, it said.

Seifert said the pace of growth is clear, while adding cautious caveats about the trend ahead. "If the current trend continues, non-human traffic could be up to 1,000 times human traffic within five years," he said. "It is not because human traffic is shrinking, but because the growth rate of non-human traffic is so fast," he said, adding that "humans on the internet could become rounding errors."

Cloudflare said efficiency improvements are needed so the internet can continue to function usefully for people in this environment. Whether a request is generated by a person or a machine, every request burdens servers and internet infrastructure. If processing efficiency does not improve, services could stop or performance could deteriorate under the weight of automated traffic, it said.

The company cited intelligent traffic management, optimised protocols, hardware acceleration and edge computing as its response. Cloudflare, a provider of security, performance and general infrastructure services, manages website traffic and helps reduce online threats. With many websites using Cloudflare's protection systems to improve loading speeds and mitigate attacks, an increase in automated traffic is directly tied to the company's core business.

Seifert also pointed to inefficiencies across the industry. He said competitors' GPU utilisation is "very low" and that in a structure where servers are bought first and then leased out again, customers take on the burden of squeezing as much as possible out of server resources. Cloudflare said improving the efficiency of infrastructure operations is more important than such a structure.

The remarks go beyond a simple traffic forecast and show the burden internet infrastructure could take on after the spread of AI. With an environment in which machines send more requests than people already becoming reality, competition in internet services is increasingly likely to shift from security or speed to how efficiently automated traffic is processed. That makes how much Cloudflare's efficiency strategy can actually reduce cost and performance problems the next point to watch, the report said.