At RSAC 2026, the tech giant is extending its zero trust access capabilities to AI agents, as a way to enable secure agentic adoption in the workforce, Cisco’s Tom Gillis tells CRN.
Cisco Systems is aiming to provide a massive boost to the adoption of AI agents in the workforce with a new set of security capabilities announced Monday, including new zero trust functionality for agentic that represents a “big step forward” for the industry, Cisco executive Tom Gillis told CRN.
The tech giant unveiled the product expansion, which includes the extension of its zero trust access capabilities to AI agents, in connection with the start of RSAC 2026 in San Francisco.
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Cisco also debuted updates to its AI Defense offering with the introduction of a free “Explorer Edition.”
What follows are five things to know about Cisco’s unveiling of zero trust for AI agents and other updates at RSAC 2026.
Shifting From ‘Access Control’ To ‘Action Control’
While the arrival of agents has created new identity and access security challenges for organizations, the reality is that traditional zero trust architectures have not been designed to handle the issues, Gillis said in an interview with CRN. And that could impede the adoption of agentic within the workforce, he said.
Fundamentally, the issue is also that controlling access is not sufficient for securing agents, according to Gillis, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s infrastructure and security group. Security must govern what actions agents can take, not just what they can log into, he said.
When it comes to securing AI agents, “we believe that has to evolve from access control to action control,” Gillis said. “It needs to be more fine-grained, and it needs to be more intelligent—where it can allow selective access for certain tasks, but not general and broad [access].”
Zero Trust Access For AI Agents
In response, Cisco is introducing Zero Trust Access for AI agents, providing task-based permissions for agentic activities.
The offering enables organizations to move from providing long-lived credentials, such as those often granted to humans, to providing tightly controlled permissions linked to specific workflows for agents, according to Cisco.
The tool also provides monitoring for evaluating whether agent actions are appropriate, effectively supervising the activities of agents, Gillis said.
Ultimately, “we need the ability to apply judgment and reasoning to the behavior of the agent, and say, ‘Does this look like something that is acceptable?’” he said.
At the moment, there are no existing capabilities of this sort available in the industry, according to Gillis.
“This is a pretty big step forward,” he said. “We do think the problem is urgent enough that we know our competitors are working on it too. We just think we’re ahead.”
Cisco said that its Zero Trust Access capabilities for AI agents will be integrated throughout its offerings in identity and security.
In other words, “this is not a point solution. This is a feature on our platform,” Gillis said. “So you don’t [have to] go deploy some new thing. This is built into secure access.”
Partners and customers will be able to register agents in Duo IAM, with the agents then mapped to accountable human workers, while Cisco Identity Intelligence will be able to discover the agentic identities and related security issues, according to the company.
Partner Opportunities
Many partners are “urgently” being asked to help their customers to address these challenges around securing AI agents, Gillis said.
Zero trust has been a major focus area in recent years for the partner community, but “you have to think very differently about the access that you give to an agent,” he said.
“Partners lead the way here,” Gillis said. “The partner is the one that is going to show the customer the nature of this problem.”
All in all, instead of blocking agents, Cisco wants to help organizations to embrace the new technology, “but do it safely,” he said. “Here’s a solution to do it, with secure access, and then to monitor the operation day to day.”
AI Defense ‘Explorer Edition’
At RSAC 2026 on Monday, Cisco also expanded its AI Defense offering with the debut of a free version, the “Explorer Edition.” The focus here is around keeping agents secure against compromise by attackers, Gillis said.
Key capabilities include dynamic red teaming for agents and model and application security testing, as well as streamlined security reporting, according to Cisco.
Partners can provide the free tool to customers as a discovery tool, Gillis noted. Partners can thus demonstrate to customers that the AI agents they’re using may have serious security flaws that need to be addressed, he said.
Offering that type of discovery is “a proven way to engage new customers,” Gillis said. “This is a dynamite opportunity for our channel partners.”
