Every vendor is selling AI in 2026. Most of the pitches are a year ahead of the product. Here is how I sort the real from the noise for Ohio mid-market networks, written so you can read it before any of us spend time on a call.
I do not sell AI as a product line. I deploy the AI features that already live inside the platforms my clients are using anyway, Microsoft 365, the SOC vendors, the hosted VoIP platforms, the SD-WAN vendors, the firewall vendors. My job is to tell you which of those features are worth turning on, which are not, and what each one does to your data exposure, your compliance posture, and your monthly bill.
The honest answer in 2026 is that AI is genuinely useful in three places and mostly oversold everywhere else. Here is how I think about each one.
Call summarization and post-call notes. Microsoft Teams Phone Copilot, the major hosted VoIP vendors, and a handful of standalone tools (Fireflies, Otter, Read.ai) all do this credibly today. Quality is good enough that you can stop taking notes and read the summary after. Worth the spend for any role where call notes matter, sales, support, professional services.
Agent assist for support and sales. Real-time prompts, suggested responses, sentiment flags. Works for high-volume contact center, generally not worth the complexity for a 50-person Ohio business with three people answering the main line.
Conversational IVR. The new generation of voice bots can hold a 30-second routing conversation that does not feel like 2010. Good for high-volume inbound. Wrong answer for a small office where the receptionist or auto-attendant gets you to the right person in 8 seconds anyway.
Live call transcription with PHI in it. This is the place healthcare clients trip. Most third-party voice AI tools send audio off-platform for processing. If you are HIPAA-covered, that is a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) question that almost no buyer thinks to ask. I do.
Extended detection and response (XDR) with AI correlation. The good SOC platforms (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender XDR) now stitch endpoint, identity, network, and email signals into single incidents instead of 50 separate alerts. The AI is real, the time-to-triage gains are real, and it is the single biggest reason mid-market security has improved in the last 24 months.
Automated triage and response. The same platforms now auto-contain compromised endpoints, force MFA re-challenge on suspicious sign-ins, and kill suspicious sessions without waiting for a human. For most mid-market budgets this is the difference between a 10-minute response and a four-hour response at 3 a.m.
Email and identity anomaly detection. Microsoft, Mimecast, Abnormal Security, all use AI to score inbound mail and sign-in patterns. Catches what static rules miss. Worth the small per-user fee.
Where it goes wrong. Vendors selling you "AI-powered next-gen" something with no clear underlying engine, no published detection model, no public benchmark results. If they cannot tell you what the AI is actually doing, they are selling marketing language. I see this all the time at the smaller MDR vendors trying to compete with CrowdStrike on price.
Predictive failure on circuits. The good SD-WAN platforms (Fortinet SD-WAN, Cisco Meraki, Cato) now do trend analysis on latency, jitter, and packet loss patterns to flag a circuit before it goes hard down. Not magic, just better-looking thresholds. Genuinely useful when your IT director is not staring at dashboards 24/7.
Application-aware traffic shaping. AI-driven QoS that learns which flows are Teams calls vs. backup vs. backup-replication traffic and prioritizes accordingly. The newer SD-WAN platforms do this well. Worth it for any multi-location setup carrying real-time voice or video over a mix of carriers.
Autonomous troubleshooting. The marketing here is a year ahead of the product. What you actually get today is better correlation across logs and faster root-cause suggestions, useful, but a long way from "the network heals itself." Anyone selling you the second version is selling you the demo.
AI-driven RMM (remote monitoring and management). A few of the better RMM platforms (NinjaOne, Datto) are starting to use AI to write patch notes, summarize alerts, and prioritize tickets. Real, modest productivity gains. Not transformative. Worth the marginal cost if you are already on the platform.
If you have Microsoft 365, turn on Copilot for the roles that benefit and skip it for the ones that do not. Audit which mailboxes have it after 90 days and trim what is not being used. Most clients overlicense by 30 percent.
If you have a SOC vendor, ask what their XDR correlation looks like across endpoint, identity, and email. If they cannot show you, you are paying for old-generation MDR. Time to look at the next platform.
If you are on legacy MPLS or a single-carrier SD-WAN, the AI features in the newer platforms (Cato, Fortinet, Meraki) are now actually useful enough to factor into a refresh decision. Not by themselves enough to justify a refresh, but enough to tip the math when you are already due.
If you are running a hosted VoIP system without call summarization, add it. The productivity gain is small per call and large over a year for any role where notes matter.
Skip everything else for now. The vendor pitch deck is two years ahead of the product on most AI claims. The honest move is wait, watch which features survive, and deploy them when they are real.
Tell me what you have, what your vendors are pitching, and where your IT director is feeling pressure. I will tell you what is worth your time and what is not. No deck. Reply within one business hour.
Talk to Jonathan →