Notre Dame's AI readiness starts with infrastructure debt

Notre Dame replaced 955 switches across 170 buildings in five months without taking the campus offline, standardizing on Cisco Catalyst 9300X switches managed via Catalyst Center. The overhaul addressed a sprawl of 28 hardware models and over 100 operating system versions accumulated through years of piecemeal upgrades. The project highlights a broader truth for enterprise IT: AI readiness begins with eliminating infrastructure debt, not deploying new models. Campus bandwidth more than doubled between 2021 and 2026, with goals to support 100-gigabit end-user connections by 2030. Key lessons include consolidating refresh cycles, aligning wired and wireless upgrades, and treating network consistency as a security control.