Cisco rolls out new agentic AI, security and quantum-readiness technologies at Cisco Live, centering on Cisco Cloud Control, AI Canvas and Agent Studio to help customers manage AI-driven infrastructure, improve operations and telemetry, and prepare networks and encryption for post-quantum threats.
Cisco Tuesday morning kicked off its annual Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas with the introduction of several new technologies aimed at bringing agentic AI and improved security to data center and cloud infrastructure.
Cisco’s full-court press on agentic AI and security is centered in large part around Cisco Cloud Control, a unified platform spanning the company’s networking, security and observability portfolios, which was originally previewed at Cisco Live 2025.
Jeff Schultz, senior vice president of portfolio strategy for the San Jose, Calif.-based company’s product organization, said at a pre-Cisco Live press conference that the new agentic AI push comes as the industry starts to view AI agents as co-workers to human employees.
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“What we are really seeing now as our customers deploy agent AIs is that literally every action that an agent takes is a combination of both a routing challenge, a trust decision and a telemetry event,” Schultz said. “Because they are deployed throughout the entire enterprise—in data centers, as well as in campuses and branches—every action they take is driving network traffic and network decisions. Security is a critical issue, and telemetry is now available with everything that they do to really help us understand their actions and their outcomes.”
While the ChatGPT world resulted in “spiky” traffic and demands on data center and cloud infrastructure, he said, agentic AI is creating a long, sustained demand on infrastructure. And agents collaborating with other agents and accessing systems introduce a lot of risk to infrastructure, Schultz added.
“We are really very firmly focused on being this critical infrastructure layer for the AI era,” he said.
Under the One Cisco strategy, Cisco looks at networking, security, observability and collaboration technologies across a couple of key outcomes, Schultz said.
- AI-ready data centers housing new digital workers that are not limited to individual buildings or networks of buildings, but extend to the edge, campus, and branch.
- Future-proof workplaces where, as the workplace changes and as agents, robots and other physical AI come into play, infrastructure and security perspectives change.
- The need for secure global connectivity in the work done around service providers and telecoms because data centers and workplaces don’t live in isolation.
“We are innovating significantly in ways to connect these data centers together in high-performance ways and connect data centers to workplaces,” he said. “And digital resilience is a foundation. So being able to leverage data in new and unique ways to understand anything that can put your business at risk, whether it’s an infrastructure issue, whether it’s a security threat, or whether it’s agents that are working outside of their guardrails and are working outside of their rules, all of this is accelerated by Cisco AI.”
Cisco Cloud Control
The latest version of Cisco Cloud Control was born from the question of what business should look like when humans and agents start to work together, said DJ Sampath, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s AI Software and Platform Group.
“It’s not just about humans clicking through dashboards, trying to keep up, but a true collaborative operating model where agents are doing the heavy lifting and humans are staying in control of what matters,” Sampath said.
The focus of Cisco Cloud Control is on agentic operations, or AgenticOps, Sampath said.
“Cisco Cloud Control is a platform where all of this comes to life,” he said. “We’re focusing on enabling cross-domain telemetry with the power of the purpose-built models that we have built with over 40 years of Cisco data and knowledge and together creating trusted agents to serve as digital co-workers.”
Cisco Cloud Control, built on the Cisco Data Fabric powered by the Splunk Platform as its unified data layer, provides cross-domain telemetry for all of a customer’s domains across all Cisco products, platforms, services and agents via what Sampath said were purposeful models aimed at solving specific types of tasks and issues. These include a deep network model, a cybersecurity model called Foundation-Sec, and frontier models.
“It’s really about matching the right intelligence to the right type of task, and that’s what we’re doing here,” he said. “We use a combination of the telemetry and the purposeful models to be able to build these trusted agents. When you combine the model intelligence with the telemetry, that’s really what makes these agents drive the outcomes that you’re looking for.”
Cisco has a strong end-to-end play that works only when utilizing all the components, said Lane Irvine, alliance leader at Long View Systems, a Calgary, Alberta-based solution provider and longtime Cisco channel partner.
“Now we can bring that together to take advantage of the Cisco platform,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity for them. I think it’s an important move as we start leading into Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel taking over all the platforms. They are trying to create a more synergistic environment for that joint development, and that’s where I think Cloud Control will be a strong move.”
With Cisco Cloud Control, Cisco wants everything to be managed from a central control plane, said Faisal Bhutto, president and CEO of Alykas, a Houston-based solution provider and longtime Cisco channel partner.
The reality is that OEMs like Cisco know their tech stacks better than anybody, Bhutto told CRN.
“Cisco knows Meraki, how it works, how it operates,” he said. “Cisco knows the Catalyst line, UCS, the whole fabric and how they operate. So customers, instead of creating their own automation tools to run a multisite WAN or SD-WAN or a big SaaS deployment, they want OEMs like Cisco to come up with agentic AI they can use along with their human resources. The promise is there. I can see that becoming more and more real, where our customers can be in Cloud Control with access to agentic bots that take action, pending approval.”
Customers won’t be comfortable letting agentic AI take actions, Bhutto said.
“But there definitely is a huge value where customers can say, ‘Instead of me having all these NOC [Network Operations Center) resources, I don’t really need them because that’s what agentic AI can handle, but I will keep decision-making in my control,’” he said. “Should there be a config change that has to be rolled out or some other modification, go into Cloud Control and approve that change for it to get pushed out. I think customers are going to be more comfortable with that.”
Cisco Cloud Control Tuesday entered controlled availability in the U.S.
Beyond Cisco Cloud Control
Within Cisco Cloud Control lies Cisco AI Canvas, an environment for humans and AI agents to work together in real time to investigate, correlate and resolve complex issues, Sampath said. AI Canvas is also going into controlled availability, he said.
To make it work, Cisco Tuesday also introduced Agent Studio, Sampath said.
“Agent Studio allows you to seamlessly bring in third-party agents that help you, and we also additionally on top of that help you design your own agents and consume the agents that we at Cisco are building for you,” he said. “[Agent Studio] systematically brings all of these pieces together, but we also recognize that every single IT administrator, security operator, every single operator, is turning into a builder today.”
Using Codex and Claude Code, businesses can build complex systems quickly, Sampath said.
“We want to help teams to customize each and every single operation in a way that’s unique to their workflows, and so we’re launching an app builder, which is a space for creating and customizing applications and workflows inside of Cisco Cloud Control, which essentially makes Cloud Control a harness that is powered by Open AI’s Codex that is natively integrated into Cisco Cloud Control,” he said.
Cisco has made a lot of investments into AI and agentic AI, Long View Systems’ Irvine said.
“As customers look at their environments now, they’ve got higher expectations of what they need to get from that environment, and that’s where Cisco and others really need to use agentic AI agents to go,” he said. “The question is, ‘How are we going to manage this from an operational perspective? How are we going to get insight into what’s going on?’ We want to be able to get predictive insight. … Agentic AI really opens the door for that.”
Cisco’s work around AI Canvas is also interesting, Irvine said.
“When I’m having a network issue, it might be my network is slow,” he said. “What does that mean? Where is that impacted? I need to be able to look at everything from security to infrastructure to wireless to end-user information. I need to look at that entire stream to analyze and quickly identify where there’s an issue, even the application level. And with the Cisco portfolio, we’ll have a much better insight into that. AI Canvas provides that platform to do it across the infrastructure.”
Cisco has also been busy on the quantum computing front, said Anurag Dhingra, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Connectivity and Collaboration Group.
Cisco has been advancing its post-quantum cryptography, and earlier this year introduced post-quantum crypto support for its smart switches and routers, Dhingra said.
“Now we’re extending that to SD-WAN links to protect all traffic in transit,” he said.
Cisco this week also unveiled significant enhancements to its post-quantum encryption capabilities, including signed digital images of the software-hardware trust angle secure boot and making its crypto libraries ready for a post-quantum world, Dhingra said.
Customers are certainly starting to look at what it takes to be quantum-ready, Irvine said.
“I don’t know that everybody fully appreciates the risk, but it is something that Cisco absolutely needs to lean into,” he said. “We need to educate our customers about quantum-ready and the requirements for quantum-ready infrastructure because the ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ move is already happening. We have to be ready for post-quantum cryptography.”
In addition, Cisco unveiled new resilient infrastructure services to help customers and partners integrate the company’s new security technologies, said Bhaskar Jayakrishnan, senior vice president of engineering for customer experience at Cisco.
Resilient infrastructure services include a three-step approach, he said: assess exposure, modernize infrastructure and build defensive resilience.
More self-healing, proactive and preventative protection helps employees and customers worry less and focus more on speed and execution instead of protecting themselves from the bad guys, Alykas’ Bhutto said.
“The reality is the same kind of capabilities over time do get into the hands of bad guys as well, and they constantly find ways to penetrate and exploit,” he said. “Why do I have a bad feeling that an LLM like a Mythos might exist somewhere else that somebody may be using already to exploit security issues? Remember, in security, the name of the game is not the threat actors or your private threat actor. There are state actors involved, and that’s a different legal thing. Who is to say that an enemy state is not already figuring out how to get ahead of it.”
Also new from Cisco is its Quantum Ready Assessment as part of Cisco IQ, which works with new quantum-ready hardware to identify areas most at risk for “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, Jayakrishnan said.
“What we help our customers with is to evaluate their landscape so that they know what to prepare for which network devices to either replace or upgrade to get to quantum readiness,” he said.
The result will be quantum-safe assessments, Jayakrishnan said.
“We give our customers a top-down and a bottom-up view of whether they can take a look at their overall estate, compare how ready they are according to the regulatory requirements of their own region, and what are the next set of actions, whether they need to upgrade the hardware, upgrade software, take care of features, or how much of their estate is quantum safe,” he said.
Quantum readiness is less about future technology and more about how to modernize and manage existing encryption, identity and trust in enterprises, Irvine said.
“Without that encryption and security in today’s environment, whatever’s coming is irrelevant, and we’ve got to make sure that we’re prepared for it now even if the immediate impacts are limited,” he said.
Quantum resilience has been a topic for years, although AI has kind of overshadowed it in the past couple of years, Bhutto said.
“Everybody has to figure out and ensure that as quantum computing becomes more readily available and accessible at certain price points, the encryption mechanisms and keys we use today are quantum-resilient,” he said. “Otherwise, they can easily be broken. Customers worry about it, but to be honest, the AI talk track has almost overshadowed everything else. Quantum security used to be a big topic two years ago. But now customers are so focused on agentic AI that they’re not talking about it as much.”
