Keith Parsons walks through how enterprise Wi Fi design evolved from standalone access points to controller centric networks, then to distributed intelligence and cloud managed architectures, and now toward AI assisted operations. You will hear what worked, what broke at scale, and how pushing more intelligence to the edge changes switching, uplinks, monitoring, and day to day workflows.

The session closes with a live look at an MCP powered assistant that queries 7SIGNAL and other tools to summarize health, find devices, and prepare executive ready insights with the potential to trigger tickets through integrations.

What you will learn

• Why standalone access points were fine for small sites and why roaming and scale pushed the industry to controllers
• How thin APs and central controllers simplified config but created new single points of failure and latency tradeoffs
• The rise of distributed intelligence where APs regained local brains for control plane decisions
• Cloud managed control, subscription models, and what moved to OpEx versus what stayed on premises
• What AI at the edge means for design, including higher AP uplink requirements and a rethink of edge switching
• Practical ways to use telemetry and LLM assistants to answer what is wrong and what to fix first

Who should watch

Network engineers, architects, and IT leaders who plan, deploy, or operate business critical Wi Fi.

Presenter

Keith Parsons is a long time wireless practitioner and educator. He founded the Wireless LAN Professionals community and the WLPC conference. Learn more at https://www.wlanpros.com/about/