Arista Networks today announced a series of new capabilities for WiFi management fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The Cognitive WiFi software provides visibility into WiFi users’ experience and initiates root cause analysis to make recommendations for resolution on a per client or group of clients basis.

By riding on AI and machine learning, Cognitive WiFi “takes this immense amount of telemetry and knowledge that we have and expresses that back to our customers in a way that really simplifies the WiFi experience,” said Ed Chapman, VP of business development and alliances at Arista Networks.

The company already provides visibility and control for almost 2,000 specific applications, but it’s expanding those capabilities to include automated reporting on the quality of the experience in video collaboration apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, explained Robert Ferruolo, technical marketing engineer at Arista.

Cognitive WiFi can identify clients that are having an issue with Zoom, for example, automatically analyze the cause of the problem, and provide a suggested remediation, Ferruolo added. Those actions aren’t automated today, but rather designed to give IT managers data to make more informed decisions about how to change or address WiFi infrastructure behaviors.

“For now, we’re mostly bubbling up the recommendations for the optimization, and a lot of our customers like that because the don’t want automatic reconfiguration of the network infrastructure,” Ferruolo said, adding that the company plans to eventually shift to more automation in that realm as IT leaders gain comfort with that approach.

The new software also includes support for OpenConfig WiFi and real-time location tracking of WiFi access points and clients based on multiple variables.

Cognitive WiFi and WiFi 6 support, including uplink access via orthogonal frequency-division multiple access and multiple-input multiple-output, will be available via software upgrade before the end of this quarter, according to Arista. The WiFi 6 support will only work on WiFi 6 access points, but the Cognitive WiFi features that are part of Arista Networks’ CloudVision networking orchestration platform will be made available to all existing customers, Chapman explained.

The vendor’s products and services, including those announced today, are primarily designed for corporate campus and branch office deployments but Arista is now also trying to position itself for telecommuters. With millions of professionals working at home for the foreseeable future it’s unclear how much enterprises will invest in products and software tailored for large-scale environments in the near term.

“If this is the new norm then I would expect we see a huge amount of interest because you’re essentially extending the corporate environment out to customers’ homes,” Chapman said. Arista, like virtually every other company in this sector, will have to see how the market responds during the next six to nine months.