Over the past several decades, campus networks have evolved from connecting wired computers, to supporting wired and wireless managed devices, to securely connecting an ever-growing mix of managed, unmanaged, and IoT devices. Today, another shift is underway. Systems increasingly do more than inform people—they act on behalf of people. AI agents can update records, trigger workflows, access systems, and make decisions in real time.

In hospitals, factories, offices, and stores, people, devices, and autonomous systems interact constantly. For example, on a factory floor, autonomous mobile robots don’t just transport parts.  They continuously coordinate their paths with machine-vision sensors and human assembly teams while local AI models dynamically optimize the assembly line.

The challenge now is building infrastructure capable of understanding, securing, and adapting to these new requirements in real time without adding complexity. Today at Cisco Live, we are delivering innovations designed to help customers operate, secure, and scale for the AI era. At the center is Cisco Cloud Control, a unified management plane that brings networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration together in a single environment for humans and AI agents.

Operational simplicity at machine scale

To build on that management simplicity, today, we’re introducing new AgenticOps capabilities that help teams identify issues earlier, troubleshoot faster, and operate at greater scale without adding complexity. Traditional troubleshooting cycles that once took hours now can happen in seconds on a Cisco network. Within this platform:

• Infrastructure Health automatically identifies degrading cables, power issues, and other hardware problems before users are impacted.
• Experience Metrics will soon be available for wired in addition to wireless, helps teams identify where the end-user experience is degrading and who is impacted. By correlating network conditions with user outcomes, it prioritizes the issues that matter most and accelerates resolution.
• AI-Powered Fabric Troubleshooting helps teams quickly investigate issues across a network fabric through natural language interaction from initial view to deep dive detail, rather than manually piecing together logs and events from multiple systems.

 

 

Our new Enterprise Networking Digital Twin adds confidence to autonomous operations. Before a recommended change is deployed, teams can test it against a model of their production environment to validate outcomes, assess business impact, and reduce risk. The result is faster deployment with more trust.

But it’s not just operations happening at machine speed.

Trust at machine speed

New frontier AI models are dramatically compressing the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation from months to hours. Traditional defensive models and patching cycles measured in weeks or quarters simply can’t keep pace.

Live Protect directly addresses this reality. It acts as a digital immune system, helping organizations defend systems in production against AI-era threats in real time. Instead of forcing emergency patch cycles and disruptive upgrades, Live Protect enables teams to quickly deploy protections, blocking exploits before they reach vulnerable code, without reboots or operational disruption.

 

 

Protecting the infrastructure is only part of the challenge. Organizations are increasingly asking a more fundamental question: Can I trust what’s connecting to my network? As unmanaged devices, IoT systems, AI agents, and users continuously connect and disconnect, the network is the one sensing and enforcement layer that is always present. It provides the visibility, context, and control needed to move beyond static policies and manual segmentation toward continuous verification and enforcement. In an environment defined by constant change, the network becomes the foundation for trust.

Trust must extend consistently across the enterprise.  As organizations expand across campuses, branches, data centers, and cloud environments, security and operations often remain fragmented across different tools and teams. With Unified Fabric in Cisco Cloud Control, organizations can design, connect, and operate campus and data center fabrics through a single experience, extending segmentation and policy consistently across environments.

 

 

The result is simpler operations, more consistent access to applications and services, and a stronger foundation for trust at scale.

Resilient infrastructure for the agentic enterprise

None of this works if the underlying infrastructure can’t keep up. That’s why we’re introducing Cisco C9550 Series Smart Switches. As the fixed aggregation “big brother” to the C9350 Smart Switches introduced last year, the C9550 is designed for the scale, smarts, and security demands of modern enterprise environments.

• Scalable: 400G uplinks offer massive processing capacity to handle the surge of machine-driven traffic–both laterally (east-west) and in the increasingly symmetric upload/download agentic traffic flows (north-south). With 8x greater IPv4 routing scale than the previous generation (C9500H Series), the C9550 is designed to support growing numbers of connected users, devices, and AI agents without requiring architectural redesign.
• Smart: Simplified deployment with out-of-the-box management works across on-premises, cloud-native, and hybrid environments. Dedicated resources for hosting AI applications, small language models , and intelligent agents such as ThousandEyes directly on the switch bringing intelligence closer to where data is created and used, for faster insights, local automation, and quicker response times.
• Secure: Hardware root-of-trust and built-in post-quantum cryptography readiness help organizations prepare for evolving security requirements and emerging quantum threats.

Like the C9350 switches, the C9500 switches are powered by Cisco Silicon One, our unique custom chips purpose-built with the foundational security, adaptability and scalable performance the modern campus requires.

This isn’t a future promise of things to come—the C9550 is orderable now.

 

 

We are also expanding our Cisco C9350 Series Smart Switch family to include the C9350 mGig and Fiber Smart Switches.

The Cisco CW9177 Series Access Points, our new high-end outdoor Wi-Fi 7 devices, are designed to bring enterprise-grade wireless to challenging outdoor environments, with AFC support to unlock outdoor 6 GHz capacity where permitted. Choose from three antenna options to deliver the right coverage for your environment, from integrated omnidirectional and directional models to external antenna support for maximum deployment flexibility.

The CW9177 Series also supports Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB), enabling organizations to extend high-performance, low-latency connectivity where fiber is impractical or mobility is required. A port, industrial yard, or large campus, for example, can use URWB to extend connectivity to outdoor areas while simultaneously delivering Wi-Fi 7 from the same access point, simplifying deployment without compromising performance.

The enhanced Cisco Campus Gateway now supports Network Groups, making it easier to scale cloud-native operations across large, complex environments, using hierarchies to organize multiple sites and network domains while supporting up to 12,000 access points and 64,000 clients. For organizations like universities, healthcare systems, and research institutions with multiple campuses and facilities, this means simpler management and greater operational consistency at scale.

All together, these innovations reflect a broader shift in what enterprise infrastructure must deliver: operational simplicity at machine scale, trust at machine speed, and resilient infrastructure built for a world where people, devices, and AI agents increasingly work together.

Some products and features described are in development and offered on a when-and-if-available basis. Cisco reserves the right to change delivery timelines and will have no liability for any delays or failures to deliver.

 

Check out the new Secure Network Reference Architecture (SNRA) CVD Architecture Guide.

 

 

See more Enterprise Networking news from Cisco Live Las Vegas 2026:
The Agentic Workplace Runs on Cisco by Anurag Dhingra
Trust at Machine Speed: Building Secure Campus Networks for the AI Era by Michael Dickman
Cisco Unveils Multicloud Fabric in Cloud Control: Network Ready for the AI Era by Rohit Agarwalla