Cisco unveils infrastructure to power agentic AI era at Cisco Live 25

If it’s an AI goldrush Cisco is selling picks and shovels

At Cisco Live, Cisco showcases the infrastructure it hopes will remove agentic AI blockers such as bandwidth constraints and safety concerns.

Yesterday, at Cisco Live, Cisco unveiled a raft of tools and innovations to help companies realise the potential of the agentic AI era.

At a media preview last week, Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, commenting on the dawning agentic AI era:

“I think we are witnessing one of the most consequential technology shifts in human history.”

“There will be tens of billions of agents that will conduct work on our behalf. Our population of eight billion humans will feel like we have a throughout capacity of 80 billion but that requires a very different infrastructure.”

Patel put the case that nothing less than a complete reimagining of traditional computing, networking and security infrastructure would do, and Cisco’s announcements today ae intended to facilitate just that.

The stack begins in the datacentre. Announcements here include Nexus Dashboard, a single unified console to manage physical and virtual clusters across network configurations and fabrics, and the full integration of Cisco’s switches with Nvidia’s Spectrum-X architecture.

Cisco’s reimagining of traditional computing, networking and security involves understanding that these are no longer distinct concepts. The goal, as Craig Connors, VP & CTO Infrastructure & Security Group is to “fuse zero-trust networking and AI driven operations from the silicon to the Security Operations Centre. “

One such fusion is AI Defense which validates that that models are acting in the way the customer desires and enforces safety and security guardrails at run time. The idea is that there will be no trade-off between safety and security with speed. Cisco also revealed a new Live protect feature.

Future proofing

Cisco says that much of its new range is designed to prevent overwhelm among IT Teams, for whom the agentic AI era presents some challenges.

AgenticOps is the flagship product here, a way of simplifying network operations by putting AI into the centre of a purpose-built model with access to cross domain data for effective trouble shooting and oversight to do it safely.

At the heart of AgenticOps is a new Cisco Deep Network Model – a new LLM purpose-built for the complexities of real networks trained on decades of Cisco data.

AI Canvas is another new tool (powered by the Deep Network Model) which can create custom dashboards and pull together data and visualizations on the fly, enhancing collaboration between different operations.

Cisco have also announced a refresh of core networking devices to meet the demands of an agentic AI powered operation.

News of further innovations included the deepening of the integration of Cisco ThousandEyes with Splunk Observability with the goal of building greater visibility and resilience into the digital stack.