Cisco Live San Diego – that’s a wrap!

Another great Cisco Live is in the books.  Who doesn’t love a week filled with Cisco innovation, networking, inspiration, and entertainment alongside 22,000 of your closest global friends?  

AI Was Everywhere 

From the opening keynote showcasing an impressive lineup of AI-powered innovations, to the World of Solutions packed with engaging demos, and countless opportunities to hear Cisco experts on stage, it’s clear that Cisco is building the critical infrastructure for the AI era. Across Cisco, including CX, we’re helping customers navigate the shift to agentic AI.  

This was the focus of Chief Customer Officer Liz Centoni’s, Day 2 Keynote: Transforming Cisco Customer Experience with AI and Human Expertise, where she shared the pivotal role of agentic AI in Customer Experience, and how we’re delivering security, resiliency, and simplicity with CX solutions like Services as Code. Cisco’s new research on agentic AI – The Race to an Agentic Future: How agentic AI will transform customer experience – is a great source for more information. 

While Cisco Live 2024 was AI-focused, it felt like a teaser compared to the incredible depth of AI innovation I witnessed last week. The growth of AI is exponential, but as Dr. Vince Kellen, CIO of UC San Diego, shared in the Day 2 Keynote, getting value out of AI is like picking olives rather than grapefruit. With a grapefruit tree, you’re drinking juice in 10 minutes, but with an olive tree it takes four months of processing and patience before you can enjoy the olives.  

It takes time to understand your AI use case, design/validate, build, deploy, adopt, and ultimately realize the return on your investment. Definitely more olive and less grapefruit. This was the focus of my session with Carlos Pereira – Accelerating Modernization and Execution Strategies for AI where we explored the challenges customers face and how CX is helping them on their AI adoption journey. 

I briefly stepped away from CX topics to join Martin Lund, EVP of the Common Hardware Group, on stage at IT Leadership. Together, we discussed preparing for AI-ready infrastructure with Silicon One and emphasized the importance of flexibility, performance, and efficiency in modernizing data center environments. And yes, he really does carry the latest Silicon One chip in his pocket! 

Another highlight of Cisco Live was the Cisco Customer Achievement Awards ceremony. Winners were selected from hundreds of nominations of customers leading the way in AI-readiness, future-proofed workplaces, digital resilience, and sustainability. We also celebrated several CX-specific award winners, including our 2025 CX Customer Hero of the Year winner – Joe Gleeson from Intel. Congratulations to Joe and all the other customer award winners!  

I’ll close this post with gratitude–for the relationships and experiences I’ve gained over many years at Cisco, my first as leader of CX Americas, and now 19 total Cisco Live events. Here’s to many more! Bookmark the Cisco Live On-Demand Library to see replays from San Diego as they’re added. 

Share: