Introducing Cisco Smart Switches for the AI-powered enterprise
This week at Cisco Live San Diego, we introduced a major leap forward in enterprise networking: The new family of Cisco C9000 Smart Switches, purpose-built for the AI-ready campus. These switches deliver blazing performance, quantum-secure networking, and radically simplified operations—supporting our new realities as AI transforms the way we work, collaborate, and operate.
From retail environments to factory floors and from operating rooms to global campuses, AI is pushing legacy networks beyond their limits. The rise of high-resolution video, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) collaboration, and IoT devices intensifies the pressure, driving demand for higher bandwidth, lower-latency traffic, and machine-speed security. Complexity—always a challenge—has become a liability, and yet the networks underpinning these shifts were built for another time.
That’s why Cisco built something entirely new—an infrastructure foundation engineered for the AI era.
Built to support AI use cases in the enterprise
Cisco Smart Switches are the first switching family engineered specifically for AI-era campus environments. They’re built to support AI workloads such as AR/VR, computer vision, industrial automation, and a range of generative AI (GenAI) and agentic use cases—while ensuring the network core scales to meet the data gravity of AI traffic.
The first two models—Cisco C9350 Fixed Access Smart Switches and Cisco C9610 Modular Core Smart Switches—feature key new innovations.
- Programmable for scalability: Cisco Smart Switches are built on a programmable architecture leveraging Cisco SiliconOne application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), supporting run to completion across isolated application slices. This means that the ASIC can run parallel operations in dedicated “slices” without interruption by other tasks. This feature supports handling a larger volume of applications, including more complex ones.
- Blazing performance: These new devices have a 10x performance improvement over our industry-leading portfolio of switches. Support for multi-gig and 100G uplinks ensures high bandwidth, so AI-heavy workloads don’t create bottlenecks.
- Quantum-ready: Protect today’s data from tomorrow’s threats with built-in cryptographic agility with support for post-quantum algorithms.
- AI-native telemetry and assurance: Real-time analytics built directly into the switch fabric help IT detect anomalies, optimize traffic, and proactively troubleshoot without the need for extra sensors.
- Unified management: Switches are managed through one dashboard, enabling end-to-end visibility, zero-touch provisioning, and intelligent automation.
- Energy efficiency: Features such as Smart Power and hibernation mode help enable more sustainable operations, with 30-40% potential energy savings.
These aren’t just feature enhancements—they represent a rethinking of what access and aggregation layers must become in the AI era.
Operational intelligence for the AI era
With the increase in users, devices, technologies, cyber adversaries, stakeholders, and expectations, operating networks of any size can be complex. When you have thousands of devices to manage across a global infrastructure, scaling securely is nearly impossible. No one can afford downtime or a costly mistake. Cisco Smart Switches help you overcome these challenges so you can onboard easily, define policies, upgrade with minimal disruption, and gain comprehensive insights across both owned and unowned infrastructure—all from a single dashboard.
Managing your network is now easier than ever. Administrators can configure and manage switching, wireless, routing, and SD-WAN all from a single dashboard. Fast, frictionless, out-of-the-box provisioning, intelligent port profiling, and automated onboarding of Wi-Fi 7 access points and multi-gig clients eliminate hours of manual effort and reduce the potential for error.
This simplicity is made possible through intelligence embedded into the switch, enabling it to dynamically detect connected device types and apply context-aware configurations through built-in AI logic. We’ve also simplified large, complex deployments with the design of a microservices-based architecture, elastic scaling, and high-availability designs. Tracking energy performance metrics has never been easier with energy insights integrated into the dashboard. Granular, device-level power analytics, scheduled power policies, and user-level carbon footprint insights support both IT operations and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
Scale more easily with fewer resources
Cisco Smart Switches unlock new levels of operational agility with rich AI and innate intelligence telemetry. This intelligence enables the telemetry system to not only collect and report data but also to analyze, interpret, and act on that data in real time without requiring external systems to process it. This provides alerts and remediation data before users are impacted. Integrations with ThousandEyes and Splunk provide end-to-end visibility from access layer to SaaS applications. No more surprises or dead ends when issues occur outside of your network. Now you can easily pinpoint the issue and remedy it on your terms, whether in the owned or unowned infrastructure.
Troubleshooting has never been easier with all-new capabilities in the Cisco AI Assistant. The conversational, natural language interface makes it easy for teams to get a view of your network’s overall condition. If an issue is occurring, Cisco AI Assistant can quickly identify root causes, suggest remedies, and at your request, implement the action of your choice—all with full audit tracking and role-based access controls.
We’re taking this simplicity even further with Cisco AI Canvas, a GenAI workspace within the dashboard that helps NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams resolve complex incidents faster and more collaboratively. AI Canvas serves as your own dynamic command center to address your network’s specific needs. You can automate tasks of your choosing and actively collaborate to accelerate the resolution of issues when they happen. AI Canvas puts everything from your network in one place, provides simple visualizations for complex issues, and amplifies your team’s productivity tenfold.
Cisco is not just helping simplify operations—we’re reengineering them for a future where networks think, adapt, and respond alongside AI workloads. The result: faster troubleshooting, higher uptime, lower operational cost, and a network that evolves as fast as your business.
Secure by design for an unpredictable future
AI is emerging as the preeminent tool for streamlining enterprise operations. It’s also redefining the threat landscape. From AI-generated phishing schemes to adversarial malware and deepfakes, threats are becoming faster, more targeted, and increasingly automated. The new Cisco Smart Switches are designed not just to keep up, but to stay ahead.
At the core of this new security paradigm is the integration of quantum-resistant technologies. Our switches have long featured secure boot and hardened Linux to prevent tampering and installation of unauthorized software. But with quantum computing on the horizon, traditional encryption methods like RSA, ECC, and Diffie-Hellman are becoming vulnerable. Cisco Smart Switches include quantum protection, future-proofing your network against current and future threats.
These switches don’t stop at device-level protection. They extend quantum-resilient encryption into the data plane itself. By incorporating post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into existing standards like MACsec, IPsec, and WAN MACsec, we ensure campus-wide data confidentiality—even as encrypted data traverses increasingly complex, AI-driven topologies. This approach interception by rogue devices or malicious edge endpoints.
Our switches are also the first line of enforcement in the Cisco Universal Zero-Trust Network Access (UZTNA) framework. They dynamically block unauthorized endpoints and lateral movement within the switch itself, enforcing granular security and access policies using real-time endpoint context. This removes the need to reroute traffic to distant firewalls for basic access control—freeing bandwidth and reducing latency. But when advanced inspection is needed, our new Security Service Insertion capability intelligently steers traffic to designated firewalls, ensuring optimal use of network and security resources. And with Live Protect coming soon, newly discovered threats can be mitigated in near-real time—without requiring image upgrades or device reboots.
In short, Cisco Smart Switches are secure by design—from the silicon to the cloud. Built for an unpredictable future, they offer protection that adapts as fast as threats evolve.
The path ahead
AI is the most transformative force in enterprise technology since the cloud, but it’s only as effective as the infrastructure supporting it. With the new Cisco Smart Switches, we’re giving enterprises the tools to harness the power of AI—safely, efficiently, and at scale.
The future of the enterprise campus is AI-powered, and now, it’s ready.
Some of the products and features mentioned are still in development and will be made available as they are finalized, subject to ongoing evolution in development and innovation. The timeline for their release is subject to change.
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