Reinventing Infrastructure for the Next Wave of AI at Cisco Live

Last week I shared my point of view on the future of AI and previewed our announcements at Cisco Live. Well, today is the day. This morning, we dropped a tremendous amount of news, all tied together under a common theme — helping our customers navigate the shift to agentic AI.  

Why This Cisco Live Matters

This year’s Cisco Live is the most consequential in some time. Not only is the level of innovation exciting, but so is the timing. We’re building the critical infrastructure for the AI era, and the next wave of AI is here with agentic AI. To harness its potential, we need to reevaluate many of the architectural assumptions we made in previous eras of computing, networking, and security.  

That’s why we’ve brought a spirit of reinvention to everything we announced at Cisco Live.  Here are some highlights:   

AI-Ready Data Centers  

It’s hard to overestimate how important data centers are to the future of AI and how dramatic the transition will be from traditional to AI-ready datacenters.  

As agentic AI becomes ubiquitous, the networks that connect compute clusters and data centers will be the key to optimizing the whole system. Moreover, as training and inference workloads tap into private data, security becomes even more essential. Trust and security are prerequisites for broad AI adoption.  

At Cisco Live we’re tackling these challenges throughout the stack:   

• Nexus Dashboard: Our customers have long asked for a single unified console to manage physical and virtual clusters across network configurations and fabrics. Here it is. Nexus now brings together NX-OS and ACI, and we will be adding Hyperfabric later this year.    
• Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA: We announced our blueprint for Secure AI Factories with NVIDIA earlier this year, with an emphasis on open architectures and embedded security. I am happy to share that we’ve fully integrated our switches with NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X architecture, and in fact our switches are the first non-NVIDIA switches to work with NVIDIA NICs.    
• AI Defense in the Secure AI Factory: If you’re working with open-source AI models and NVIDIA, our AI Defense technology should be part of your architecture. AI Defense validates that your models are acting how you want them to, and then it enforces your safety and security guardrails at run time. Now is the time to move fast and innovate. With AI Defense you won’t have to trade off safety and security for speed.  
• Live Protect: Why wait for the perfect moment to patch when you can outsmart exploits in real-time? Live Protect flips the script on hardware vulnerabilities. When we spot a CVE, we now have a compensating control that your network admins can deploy with a click. No downtime. Your devices stay protected while you decide when (or if) to patch. Life will never be the same!  

To check out all the data center news at Cisco Live, make sure to read our full announcement. We also shared an incredible array of security innovations geared to agentic AI.  

Future-Proofed Workplaces  

The future of work is distributed, AI-powered, and hyper-connected. This future will no doubt drive traffic growth and new security concerns across campus, branch, and industrial networks.   

At Cisco Live, we focused on delivering new technologies and tools that will help already overwhelmed IT teams meet the moment, including:  

• AgenticOps: AgenticOps is our new approach to network operations that reimagines how you work by putting AI at the center of your experience. The vision of AgenticOps is to proactively help you manage and troubleshoot your networks with intelligence and ease.    
• The Cisco Deep Network Model: At the heart of AgenticOps is a new LLM purpose-built for the complexities of real networks that we call the Cisco Deep Network Model. Trained on Cisco’s decades of networking expertise, Deep Network outperforms general-purpose models, with greater 20% higher precision and accuracy on networking tasks, while also being leaner in size.  
• AI Canvas: AI Canvas is a revolutionary new tool that can instantly create custom dashboards and pull together data and visualizations on the fly, making collaboration between NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps seamless. AI Canvas is also powered by Cisco’s Deep Network Model. 
• New networking devices: To connect our future proof workplaces, we announced a full portfolio of next-generation devices that are purpose-built to meet the demands of AI workloads. This is the biggest refresh of core networking devices in at least a decade, and we’re incredibly proud of them.  

To see the full picture of how we’re future proofing workplaces at Cisco Live, read the full news (link to press release).  

Digital Resilience  

The most important requirement of your infrastructure today is that it stays secure and available.   

We all operate in complex environments. Outages and issues are inevitable. The difference between good and great, though, is how fast you learn about a problem and how fast you remediate it. That’s the definition of resilience, and it’s fundamentally a data problem.   

Cisco has visibility into more critical data to drive your digital resilience than anyone else, and we’re bringing that data together for you in the Splunk data platform. At Cisco Live, we continued to drive deeper integrations between Cisco and Splunk. You can learn all about them in our Splunk resilience blog.   

We’re Just Getting Warmed Up

 Believe it or not, these are just a handful of the highlights from Cisco Live. Today, we are moving with more urgency and focus than ever before. And we need to. AI is changing that fast and the opportunity is bigger than anything I have ever seen in my lifetime.    

Ultimately, I believe there will only be two types of companies in the world: those who embrace AI and those who struggle to stay relevant.   

Our goal is to make sure that when you build on Cisco, you’ll be one of the winners.   

AI is changing that fast…and the opportunity is bigger than anything I have seen in my lifetime.
— Jeetu  

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