Next week we’re hosting Cisco Live in San Diego. We’re bringing together more than 20,000 Cisco customers to celebrate innovation and collaborate on shaping the future. I’m incredibly excited.
We’re introducing major innovations for everyone, whether you’re building the data centers of the future, mapping out the roadmap for your corporate networks, or hustling in the background to keep it all up, running, and secure.
Clearly, the seismic force driving everything right now is AI. Some of you may be fatigued by the pace of AI change and the rush to add AI to everything you do. I completely understand. But, if anything, I think the power and potential for AI to change our world is still underestimated. We’re on the verge of the first major inflection in the development of AI since we all collectively had our “ChatGPT moment” some two and half years ago.
Say Hello to Agentic AI
Right now, we’re moving from a world where intelligent chat bots help us answer questions, draft emails, and create images, to one where for the first time, intelligent, autonomous agents will be capable of automating entire workflows in every industry, from coding and debugging software to solving complex problems that require interaction and coordination among multiple agents.
This is truly a profound shift that brings with it some new anxieties. It would be naive to think that agentic AI won’t dramatically change some jobs and industries. New technology always does. But in the bigger picture, agentic AI will expand what all of us as individuals, teams, and organizations can do.
I think it’s worth exploring what this means in practical terms. Doctors could help more people, researchers could pursue more new ideas, engineers could solve more problems, entrepreneurs could imagine new business ideas, and so on.
At the same time, agentic AI is not just about doing more. AI agents will produce original insights and help us solve problems that we might never have dreamed of solving before. In this sense, I think agentic AI is the single most important technology leap of our lifetimes so far.
Agentic AI at Cisco Live
Here’s how you should think about Cisco: we’re building the critical infrastructure for the AI era. And the maturation of agentic AI is making our work even more important and timely.
Soon, there will be billions of AI agents working together harmoniously on our behalf, around the globe, and around the clock. All of us will be interacting with agents, collaborating closely with them as part of our work and everyday lives. As cool as that sounds, from a technological perspective, this fundamentally alters many of the architectural assumptions our industry has made over the past few decades. And it’s driving three major shifts in the market.
––––– First, like generative AI, but to an infinitely greater degree, agentic AI is network constrained.
Agentic AI requires multi-cloud, multi-model, multi-agent architectures as the norm. It puts a premium on communication between agents that will be running within and across data centers, and across literally every place we live, work, and connect with customers – all at incredible speed and scale. The demands of agentic AI will only get further exacerbated with the advent of physical AI, including robotics and humanoids.
For this reason, agentic AI simply won’t work without ultra-fast, low-latency, energy-efficient networks. Next week we’ll unveil network innovation across our portfolio, from technology for cloud hyperscalers, to the data center, to global service providers, and the campus, branch, and industrial networks of the future.
In addition to debuting smarter and faster devices, we’ll introduce native AI tools that will help you design, build, and manage your networks, ensuring they’re more resilient and easier to run than ever before.
––––– Second, safety and security will be the defining challenge of agentic AI.
Every new agent is both an asset and a new security risk. As such, agentic AI will force us to challenge assumptions, such as how we validate identity and how quickly we must respond to threats when something goes wrong.
The only scalable way to deal with the complexity of agentic AI is to fuse security into the network. Next week we’ll share how we’re reimagining today’s security stack for a world where there are vastly more agents and machines in our workforces than humans, behaving in ways we can’t always predict.
We’ll also dive into how we’re helping you safeguard AI applications and agents across the enterprise, protect AI models themselves, secure the critical infrastructure behind your own business, and equip your resource-strapped security teams with cutting-edge AI tools.
––––– Third, agentic AI demands global scale, and Cisco uniquely operates at that magnitude.
We work with hyperscalers, governments, cloud providers, service providers, and enterprises around the world. This unparalleled reach gives us the visibility, insights, and data to drive innovation across the entire AI ecosystem. We will support the emergence of more sovereign data centers which are becoming particularly critical for governments, defense, healthcare, finance, and critical infrastructure sectors.
It’s an opportunity we have been embracing in a big way this year, with the sheer volume of announcements we’ve recently made underscoring our role. You may have seen initiatives like the Stargate UAE partnership, our expanded commitment to France with the development of a strategic AI hub, and groundbreaking collaborations to build secure AI factories with NVIDIA.
This is just the beginning.
At Cisco Live we’ll share more about our work to cultivate an ecosystem that puts our customers at the forefront of AI innovation. I can’t wait to see so many of you next week in San Diego.
– Jeetu
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