Our recent Reddit AMA with Cisco experts Reid Butler, Oren Brigg, and Raj Kumar Goli sparked a strong discussion with developers, architects, and operators working on real automation challenges at scale. Across the thread, a clear approach came through: automate across the environments teams already run, keep engineers in control, and reduce operational risk in production. 

A few themes came through clearly: 

• AI is a reasoning layer, not a config engine. Cisco’s approach is to use AI to analyze telemetry, correlate signals across systems, and propose actions, while execution stays in prebuilt workflows that have already been tested, versioned, and approved. 
• Start with a source of truth. At scale, the network has to be treated like a software system, with consistent data for sites, IP pools, VLANs, SGTs, policies, and device roles feeding repeatable automation workflows. 
• Deterministic execution is critical in production. Safe automation depends on validation before execution, approval gates for higher risk changes, scoped rollouts, halt conditions after repeated failures, and complete logs for every action, diff, and approval. 
• Multi-system automation is the real job. Developers are not working in a single console. They are integrating across Meraki, Catalyst Center, ISE, ThousandEyes, ServiceNow, NetBox, PagerDuty, AWS, Azure, and REST APIs. Cisco’s focus is on simplifying work across those environments, not forcing everything into one tool.
• API consistency still matters. Cisco’s direction is unified consumption: making objects, terminology, and workflows more consistent across platforms, while introducing schema changes carefully so existing integrations keep working.
• Campus fabric scale depends on design discipline. For large environments, the guidance was consistent: standardize the underlay, define fabric roles clearly, use intent based workflows, and avoid site by site operational drift. Meraki Dashboard now supports organization wide fabric provisioning, with policy integration through ISE.
• The best early wins are repetitive tasks. Compliance checks, client provisioning, PSK rotation, site turn ups, and incident triage stood out as strong starting points because they are frequent, bounded, and easier to measure. Two practical entry points came up in the discussion: Agentic Workflows in the Meraki dashboard and DevNet Sandbox for hands on experimentation.
• The hard part is often organizational. Python, Ansible, and Terraform can all play a role, but teams still need agreement on ownership, workflow design, and the source of truth. In practice, aligning NetOps, security, and application teams is often harder than choosing the tooling. 

What came through clearly in the AMA is that Cisco is building for the way developers and operators actually work today: across heterogeneous environments, with strong guardrails for production, and with APIs, sandboxes, and automation tools for hands on development.  

Thanks to everyone who joined the conversation and asked thoughtful questions. You can read the full Reddit AMA thread here. Then head to Cisco DevNet to explore APIs, sandboxes, learning labs, and automation resources.