Two years ago, AI was a frontier of curiosity, “what if” scenarios that sparked imagination: What if we could analyze every pixel on a production line? What if we could offer real-time clinical diagnostics? What if we could personalize every retail interaction? Organizations were in the experimental phase, treating AI as a series of isolated projects.
Today, that curiosity has matured into a strategic imperative. AI is no longer a standalone project; it is becoming the central nervous system of the modern enterprise. As AI moves from the lab to the factory floor, the hospital ward, and the retail storefront, the demands on infrastructure have fundamentally changed. We must build for more than just performance. Reliability, security, and agility are essential to scale your AI initiatives with confidence.
The reality of production-grade AI
When an AI model is a proof-of-concept, degraded performance and latency issues are an inconvenience. When that same model drives an autonomous manufacturing process or a critical patient-monitoring system, those same challenges translate directly into business failure.
Our customers are navigating this transition, and they are facing the reality of production-grade requirements. Success requires a full-stack approach- one that optimizes performance, secures every layer, and leverages AI-powered automation to manage the entire environment.
Today at Cisco Live U.S., we are unveiling technology that accelerates this journey, providing a new pathway to secure network infrastructure and deliver transformative, agentic operations across the Cisco product portfolio.
Accelerating time-to-value
Enterprises are under immense pressure to deliver AI services faster, yet the path from purchase to a fully operationalized environment is often stalled by complexities of operationalizing infrastructure. From initial Day-0 setup to Day-1 performance validation and final deployment, these manual processes result in a significant loss of time, revenue, and competitiveness.
We address these challenges by enabling organizations to automate the deployment of infrastructure and services from a rack of hardware to a production-ready application in hours, not weeks, through two innovations:
1. End-to-end networking from Kubernetes to fabric
For the past decade, the enterprise data center has effectively run two parallel networks — one for virtual machines and bare metal and one for Kubernetes — each with its own overlay, security model, and operational tooling. That fragmentation no longer scales for AI.
Isovalent Networking for Virtualization (INV) closes the gap with the integration with Nexus One. Built on the standards-based VXLAN EVPN control plane Cisco helped define at the IETF, INV makes every Kubernetes node a native EVPN speaker on the Cisco Nexus One Fabric. VMs, pods, and bare-metal servers all become first-class citizens of one identity-aware network, and workload identity travels with the workload through BGP, so the policy Cilium enforces inside Kubernetes is the same policy the fabric enforces on the wire.
For Neoclouds and sovereign clouds, time-to-onboard is time-to-revenue. AI Infrastructure Orchestrator Integration with Nexus One reduces this from weeks to minutes.
Nexus One enables segmentation at an even more granular level with a patent pending innovation. With Job-Level Segmentation, each AI job from the scheduler carries its own fabric policy, so one tenant can run premium inference alongside best-effort training and isolate a regulated workload from sibling jobs. This is the first AI back-end fabric on the market to operate at the job level.
2. Stack automation by Quali & Cisco Compatible AI Solutions
We are simplifying the path from raw infrastructure to production-ready applications. Through our new Cisco Compatible AI Solutions program, we qualify AI applications to ensure they are enterprise-ready, giving your organization confidence to bring new services to market faster.
Complementing this, we’re automating the full-stack deployment of Day-0 and Day 1 operations with Stack Automation by Quali. This allows your team to move from rack to app in hours rather than weeks by seamlessly orchestrating the deployment of hardware, Cisco software, third-party tools, and ISV applications in one unified, automated flow. By removing the manual burden of standing up the environment, we ensure your infrastructure is ready to support your business goals the moment it arrives.
Speed is only an asset if it remains secure. As we accelerate deployment cycles, we must also eliminate the security bottlenecks that typically slow down production.
Deliver security at speed
Traditional patching cycles cannot keep up with the pace of AI. We are introducing new ways to shield your infrastructure from vulnerabilities in real-time, without disruptive reboots or software upgrades.
In an AI-driven environment, the “patching gap,” the time between a vulnerability being discovered and a system being secured, is a massive liability. Industry data shows that one in five breaches today begins with an exploited unpatched vulnerability. We cannot afford to wait for a maintenance window to secure a network, Cisco Live Protect closes that gap. By pushing Vulnerability Shields directly to Cisco N9000 switches, we block exploits at the function path, keeping the network secure without stopping the business. Furthermore, by integrating Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into our N9000 switches, we are ensuring your long-term intellectual property remains safe against tomorrow’s threats.
AgenticOps: The future of IT operations
The world is moving at AI speed, but IT operations are often still constrained by manual, ticket-based workflows. Leveraging AgenticOps shifts the burden of management from humans to intelligent agents powered by purpose-built models.
Cisco Cloud Control serves as the unified management platform for the AI era, providing one login, one inventory, one set of alerts, one assistant, one agentic workspace with AI Canvas across the Cisco product portfolio.
Deep-reasoning agents now integrate across all of Cisco’s products, accelerating the workflows for the operators. This enables troubleshooting use-cases powered by agentic skills such as fabric discovery and topology, AI workload observability, anomaly detection, network analytics, change correlation, and inventory across compute, networking, and storage. This empowers IT teams to move beyond reactive firefighting toward proactively managing their AI services.
Turning ambition to execution
The leaders of the next decade won’t be those with the most infrastructure, but those who can operationalize it with the highest precision and security. At Cisco, we are transforming the data center into a predictable, secure utility, allowing you to focus on the business outcomes that matter most.
If you are attending Cisco Live, be sure to stop by the AI-ready Data Center zone on the show floor to see these innovations in action and talk to the teams building the future of the AI era.
