Partner Summit 26 brought together our global partner ecosystem for three days of productive collaboration and alignment. Our partners made it clear: they are ready to turn AI ambition into measurable business outcomes. To get there first and faster, though, we must close the “trust gap.”

Innovation in agentic AI is accelerating, and so are the risks. Organizations need AI they can trust. As we demonstrated at Partner Summit, Cisco is helping partners guide customer conversations and deploy trusted AI at scale by focusing on three key pillars:

• Security. Using our technology portfolio, partners can build modern, more-secure AI infrastructure.
• Observability. With Splunk by Cisco, we’re enabling partners to set operational guardrails for autonomous agents with full transparency and human oversight.
• Tokenomics and ROI. We’re also providing the deep visibility required to ensure AI investments drive tangible business value.

The Cornerstone of Trusted AI

These are still the early days of agentic adoption. In the next two to three years, agents will go mainstream, and soon after, the enterprise will be fully agentic. At that point, AI security will be synonymous with enterprise security. Leveraging the Cisco portfolio and the expertise of our partner ecosystem, we can help customers build the necessary security foundations now and for the future.

Powered by the Splunk Platform, the Cisco Data Fabric provides an AI-ready data architecture, delivering the visibility and context necessary for reliable agent execution. Alongside it, Cisco AI Defense delivers an active protection layer for all interactions between AI models and enterprise networks. Together, these technologies form a robust security and observability stack for the agentic enterprise, enabling partners to help customers observe, optimize, and govern AI at scale.

With the combined Cisco portfolio, partners can help customers:

• Stop attacks everywhere, providing proactive defense against evolving threats.
• Secure the workforce, protecting identity and access in an agentic world.
• Defend at machine speed, leveraging automated insights to stay ahead of adversaries.

Cisco AI Defense secures the perimeter surrounding AI integrations, while Cisco Data Fabric provides continuous governance and visibility into model behavior, performance, and compliance with organizational standards.

Winning in the Agentic Era: The Partner Opportunity

Beyond technical implementation, transitioning to an agentic enterprise is a massive business transformation. For partners, this creates new avenues for high-margin, predictable revenue. Whether an established Splunk partner or a traditional Cisco partner, key growth opportunities include:

• Investing in enablement. Partners can take advantage of Blackbelt digital learning paths for baseline skills building and high-touch practice-building workshops to sharpen architectural expertise and proof-of-concept execution.
• Driving co-sell growth. By leveraging the full Cisco portfolio, partners can support the entire customer lifecycle across networking, infrastructure, and security.
• Building advisory and managed services. Customers need help with visibility, cost management, and security governance as they deploy AI. Partners can turn data into actionable outcomes to build long-term, high-value engagements.
• Developing localized solutions. As data policies evolve globally, partners can offer sovereign solutions hosted locally to address critical customer requirements around data residency and regulatory compliance.

In the rapidly emerging agentic AI era, the partner opportunity to build sustainable, high-growth businesses has never been stronger. Deploying Cisco technology for our customers, partners are architects of resilience, empowering customers to operationalize trusted AI and evolve.

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