Building Critical Infrastructure for the AI Era

As I reflect on the incredible energy and groundbreaking announcements from Cisco Live, one of the overarching themes continues to resonate deeply with me: Along with our customers and partners, Cisco is not just talking about AI Infrastructure, we’re actively building it.

We are all seeing the world of work rapidly evolve. It’s becoming increasingly distributed, powered by AI, and hyper-connected. This transformation, while exciting, also brings unprecedented demands on our networks and, by extension, on the incredibly talented IT teams who manage them. The sheer volume of traffic growth and the emergence of new security concerns across campus, branch, and industrial networks are challenges that require a fundamentally new approach. 

That’s exactly what we achieved at Cisco Live. The innovations, customer conversations, demos, and trainings we unveiled represent a truly significant leap forward for our customers and the entire industry. We redefined the possibilities of network operations for this new era, prioritizing intelligence and simplicity … while transforming the role of secure connectivity into a foundational pillar for AI infrastructure in the workplace. 

AgenticOps 

Our vision for AgenticOps is to proactively help you manage and troubleshoot your networks, transforming the way you work by placing AI at the very center of your experience. 

At the heart of AgenticOps lies a truly remarkable innovation: the Cisco Deep Network Model. This is not just another large language model; it’s an LLM purpose-built for the unique complexities of real networks. Trained on Cisco’s decades of unparalleled networking expertise, our Deep Network Model consistently outperforms general-purpose models, delivering greater than 20% higher precision and accuracy on networking tasks, all while being leaner in size. This purpose-built intelligence is a game-changer. 

AI Canvas 

We also introduced AI Canvas, a revolutionary new tool that leverages the power of the Cisco Deep Network Model to instantly create custom dashboards and pull together data and visualizations on the fly. Imagine the seamless collaboration this enables between NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams — a true unification of insights.  

Next Gen Networking Devices 

To ensure our customers have the physical infrastructure to support this AI-driven future, we announced a full portfolio of next-generation networking devices specifically designed to meet the demands of AI workloads. This is the biggest refresh of our core networking devices in at least a decade, and I couldn’t be prouder of what our teams have accomplished. 

Cisco’s Leadership 

Why are we so excited about this new era? Because no other vendor can match the breadth of our capabilities across switching, routing, wireless, and Industrial IoT for campus, branch, and industrial use cases. Our customers need secure network fabrics that connect everything with higher bandwidth and lower latency, addressing their needs for sophistication, scale, and simplicity. Cisco is the AI infrastructure company that is uniquely positioned to deliver this. 

Operational simplicity, especially with AgenticOps, is paramount. In the era of agentic AI, organizations will need to operate their networks at machine scale, yet with close human-agent interaction. Innovations like AI Canvas and our new Cisco Cloud Control demonstrate how we are uniquely capable of correlating cross-domain data and applying sophisticated AI capabilities trained on knowledge unique to Cisco. With Cisco Cloud Control, IT teams will be able to execute cross-product workflows, proactively identify and resolve issues, and manage infrastructure in a unified way. This level of innovation is simply unmatched in the market. 

Furthermore, we are fusing security directly into the fabric of the network. Agentic AI represents one of the most significant security challenges of our lifetime. Our announcements, such as integrating our new campus smart switches into our hybrid mesh firewall, introducing Cisco Live Protect to address vulnerabilities without network downtime, and enhancing deep telemetry integration with Splunk, are critical steps in addressing these challenges at machine-scale. 

I am incredibly proud of the teams working with our customers to redefine this space. We are operating with the speed of a startup and the scale of an market leader. It is because of these teams that Cisco is and will remain the undisputed market share leader in both switching and wireless networking.    

Unmatched Scale 

In the last two years Cisco has unified our hardware platforms, licensing, and support, starting with wireless and now extending to switching and routing. We’ve also unified cloud management for all our new and existing devices, maintaining our commitment to giving customers choice in cloud, on-premise, and hybrid management.  

Our solutions are the core of campus and branch networks worldwide, powering 85% of Fortune 500 companies and serving every major industry.  And, we connect over 35 million network devices to our management platforms, and power over 1 billion connected clients. 

This is a new era for networking, and a significant opportunity for our customers, enabling them to navigate the complexities of building AI Infrastructure with confidence and unparalleled security. The innovations showcased at Cisco Live represent a fundamental leap forward in how we think about, build, and operate networks.

I am incredibly optimistic about what we will achieve together.
— Jeetu