Last week was Cisco Live US which ran over a few days. As expected, the theme was very my Agentic AI and how Cisco are positioning themselves to be the infrastructure needed for organisations to embrace this next technology shift.

What was announced, what does it mean and why does it matter for Cisco, for their customers and for their partners?

1. How Cisco are Leading in the Agentic Era

Cisco’s opening message was quite blunt: AI traffic will triple in next three years, and agentic AI (which comprises of software agents, physical AI, and AI powered robotics) is expected to generate 450% more traffic per task than humans generate today.

Just like when the world adopted cloud – networking becomes the bottleneck in most cases unless infrastructure evolves and business realise the importance of infrastructure in our AI future!

Why does infrastructure matter in the Agentic AI World?

Cisco explained that:

• AI is no longer a workload that “just” sits in someone else’s Cloud / Hyper-Scaler, or Data Centre – it becomes a pervasive, distributed, real‑time system that operates at all levels across every aspect of our connected world.
• (Enterprise) businesses need AI‑ready networks, AI‑ready security, and AI‑ready operations to prevent non-AI-ready legacy technologies being a blocker
• Just like in the Internet and Cloud era. Cisco are positioning themselves as the infrastructure backbone for the agentic era, not just a networking vendor.

Why is our existing network infrastructure not good enough?

Cisco explained that the real issues with “yesterday’s” networks is that they were not designed with the architecture and awareness to handle the way that AI and autonomous systems work. This is mainly because:

• Yesterday’s networks are optimised for human‑driven interactions and mainly north-south or peer to peer and mesh-style communications.
• In the new world, AI agents can operate at machine speed, concurrently, in multi-step, without natural throttling and 24×7 – often talking to other agents that work the same way.
• Data transmissions are generally smaller in size but magnitudes bigger in volume which is a different profile to what networks had been built for.
• Traditional monitoring, troubleshooting, and security models cannot keep up.

2. Cisco Cloud Control | A Unified Control Pane

Cisco also announced their new Unified Cloud Control Platform – a single platform that brings every Cisco product under one operational model.

Leveling the Game

This is something some of Cisco’s competitors have had for a while and has been a huge ask from Cisco customers and partners globally. Cisco confirmed that:

Cisco are collapsing networking, security, collaboration, observability, and compute into one platform with one data model and one policy engine.

This is the biggest architectural shift since Cisco DNA and will be well received (and is needed for their vision to come true).

What this fixes

Historically, Cisco’s portfolio has been powerful but fragmented with a few failed attempts to being these separate products (home grown and acquired products and solutions) together under one platform/interface. This has resulted (in the most case) today’s operations to require manual correlation across tools and Cisco are not the only vendor that have this problem.

Cisco Cloud Control promises to replace dozens of consoles and interfaces with one intent‑driven, AI‑assisted control plane. This will significantly reduce operational complexity and accelerates deployment helping both self-managed customers and managed service partners. It is able to automate correlation, remediation, and agent governance.

Cisco demonstrated on-stage how IT Ops could go from a single prompt to cross‑domain troubleshooting in minutes, with zero trust, identity intelligence, context understanding and AI guardrails built in.

Cisco are positioning Cloud Control not as a dashboard, but as an AI‑operated (human-in-the-loop) platform meaning customers get faster MTTR, proactive risk reduction, and AI‑assisted operations.

3. Cisco IQ – Bringing Agentic Vision to Reality

Cisco IQ (also announced) is a new AI-powered platform that unifies IT management, support, and automation to deliver real-time insights, predictive guidance, and personalized operational intelligence. It is able to map networks at machine speed, identify vulnerabilities, and eliminate guesswork, becoming the AI‑powered observability and risk engine for the entire Cisco ecosystem.

It naturally will integrate seamlessly with Cisco Cloud Control.

How Cisco IQ transforms vulnerability management

Traditional asset and vulnerability management is slow and incomplete and usually requires a plethora of tools or expansive monitoring platforms or outsourced service.

Cisco IQ provides a benchmark view of every Cisco asset, configuration, and risk (configuration, threat, vulnerability etc) allowing IT teams to compare their posture against peers and industry standards. Powered by a “fleet of agents”, they work together and adapt to each customer’s operational environment, delivering personalised recommendations, contextual insights, and actionable guidance

The platform aims to reduces manual effort by driving down resolution timelines from hours to minutes and at the same time embeds expert knowledge directly into workflows, helping teams execute projects faster and with fewer errors. It works and thinks like a CCIE across every control pane and is able to identity and prioritise critical risks before they impact operations, enabling a more proactive infrastructure management and resilience.

Cisco say this will significantly improve operations, remove the need for out-dated and manual audits and hundreds of spreadsheets. Cisco IQ will instead deliver automated, real‑time intelligence.

4. Splunk takes centre stage with Cisco Cloud Control

Cisco showcased no less than Three live demos which showed of Cloud Control managing AI‑ready data centres, enterprise workplaces, and digital resilience.

Traditionally, observability and operations have been separate domains and separate vendor products often at huge expense from a product and operational overhead. Cisco have been moving to a more unified approach for a couple of years while they slowly assimilated Splunk into their portfolio.

Cisco are now positioning Splunk (which competed acquisition last year) as the ingredient that supercharges Cloud Control with unified data across applications, network, AI, and infrastructure. Essentially this means that Splunk moved from acquisition add-on to an integral part of Cloud Control providing the analytics engine behind their AI‑operated infrastructure.

A Cisco Live like no other

Cisco Live 2026 was really about Cisco enforcing, driving home and repositioning themselves as the integrated, AI powered Infrastructure partner that businesses can rely on for their own agentic future. Cisco Live was all about making sure that their customers, partners and investors, see “the new” Cisco as:

• the AI‑era infrastructure company
• the agentic operations platform provider, and
• a company that is truly unified with a cross‑domain control plane for the whole enterprise.

This was about full‑stack architectural shift with clear messages to their existing, new and “once” Cisco customers with a promise for:

• Reduced complexity, increased resilience, and faster time‑to‑value.
• A clear path to adopt AI safely, securely, and at scale.
• A unified platform that protects existing investments while enabling future innovation.