Cloudflare is gearing up for a future dominated by AI agents, as CEO Matthew Prince outlined the need for new infrastructure to support massive bot-driven demand. He described a system of on-demand “sandboxes” that could be created instantly to handle tasks like travel planning or online shopping, potentially scaling to millions of instances per second as AI adoption grows.

Prince noted that unlike the temporary traffic spike during the COVID-era streaming boom on platforms like YouTube and Netflix, AI-driven growth shows no signs of slowing. As a result, Cloudflare is positioning itself to manage this shift with tools that improve site performance, protect against attacks, and even block unwanted bot traffic—highlighting what Prince calls a fundamental “platform shift” in how people access and consume information online.