HPE Unveils ‘Self-Driving’ AI Features In New Switches And Software

The company rolls out new retail-focused capabilities in its portfolio of networking products.

HPE drew back the curtain on its beefed-up networking offerings for retailers this week at the NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show event in New York City.

The company has added new eight-port switches to its lineup of HPE Aruba Networking CX 6000 Switch devices. The new models ship with or without Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities.

The new switches feature “self-driving” operations, including AI analytics, advanced telemetry, Internet of Things probing and system monitoring to help reduce dropped connections and provide energy usage insight, the company said in a press release.

The PoE-enabled models support retail devices like wireless access points, cameras, point-of-sale systems and other devices common in retail network environments.

In addition to the new CX 6000 devices, HPE enhanced its Mist AIOps platform—the company’s cloud‑based network operations technology that resulted from its acquisition of Juniper Networks last year.

Mist AIOps delivers business insight through an integration between the Marvis virtual assistant, the AI interface of Mist AIOps and HPE’s Juniper Networking Premium Analytics. The integration, HPE says, delivers location intelligence, network performance data and other networking metrics via a natural language AI interface.

Among the other news: HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight is now baked into HPE Networking Central. User Experience Insight supports Wi-Fi 7—the latest Wi-Fi standard—and employs sensors that can pick up issues resulting from upgrades or changes to the network.

Why This Matters For The Midmarket

HPE’s new products and services are primarily targeted at retailers. While retail isn’t a top industry for midsize business, retail and e‑commerce accounted for 22.89 percent of small- and midsize-business software revenue in 2025, according to a report from Mordor Intelligence.

In addition, HPE’s new offerings can be used by midmarket businesses outside retail. For instance, the self-driving capabilities of the new CX 6000 switches could help lean IT teams identify and mitigate network issues faster with fewer staff—something that is of benefit to any midmarket business in any vertical.

And the HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight has potential to help midmarket IT teams manage networks at multiple sites as well as organizations that rely on continuous network uptime.

While HPE does focus on retailers, in an interview with MES Computing last year, Larry Lunetta, vice president of AP security and networking product marketing at HPE, and Gayle Levin, product marketing lead for wireless at HPE Aruba Networking, stressed that HPE products are applicable across all sorts of industries.

“Mission-critical networking is really the core of what we do,” Lunetta said at the time.