Let’s take a closer look at what I found most significant — and how Cisco might build upon its current efforts to further realize its ambitions.

(Note: Cisco is an advisory client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.)

Focusing On Agentic AI And Customer Experience

At Cisco Live, the mainstage sessions over two days centered on two key areas: (1) a multitude of new solution announcements, and (2) enhancements in customer experience initiatives.

As expected, day one focused on Cisco's ongoing evolution with modern AI into agentic capabilities, from both connectivity and security standpoints. Jeetu Patel, the company’s chief product officer who was recently promoted to president, presented a pragmatic strategy that emphasizes AI-ready data centers, future-ready workplaces, and digital resilience achieved by embedding security features within Cisco’s network infrastructure portfolio. I was especially impressed by his explanation of the differences between generative and agentic AI inferencing demands, underscoring the need to future-proof connectivity and compute infrastructure to meet the needs of persistent agentic workloads. His demonstration also highlighted the importance for Cisco to place greater emphasis on supporting these types of workloads — something I will revisit as a potential area for growth.

On day two, executive vice president Liz Centoni, who assumed leadership of the company’s overall customer experience initiative a year ago, introduced a completely refreshed strategy. This change was long overdue, considering that Cisco’s initial CX launch was more procedural and technically disconnected from its infrastructure offerings, making it difficult for both channel partners and customers to navigate.

What stands out about the new effort is the deeper integration of products and solutions supported by an AI adoption agent and a purpose-built large language model. This combination leverages the company’s extensive knowledge base built over four decades of issue tracking and resolution. Cisco undoubtedly maintains the largest data lake in its industry, offering the potential to accelerate deployments and quickly resolve common issues like infrastructure misconfigurations. For me, Centoni’s defining moment came when she stated the goal of making every customer feel like Cisco’s only customer. It’s a bold aspiration, but I believe Cisco has the resources to fulfill this promise.

AgenticOps — The New Edge Of Cisco’s AI Infrastructure Offering

Given the sheer volume of announcements made at Cisco Live this year, selecting one standout is no easy task. However, the company’s new AgenticOps platform stood out to me for two reasons. First, it includes what I consider a beautifully designed management console called AI Canvas. AI Canvas offers an intuitive user interface integrated with a generative AI-powered natural language tool that enables users to personalize views using dynamically generated widgets. As a result, AI Canvas delivers a dynamic and real-time view into the inner workings of a customer’s infrastructure landscape — providing network assurance, security observability, and remediation functionality powered by Cisco’s Splunk, ThousandEyes, AppDynamics, Duo Security, and other solution sets.

Secondly, a newly developed Deep Network Model aims to supply AI Canvas with data drawn from Cisco’s internal knowledge repository. Together, they have the potential to significantly streamline network and security operations through deep observability, advanced visualization, and robust collaboration tools to address network issues and strengthen security posture and cyber defense.

I also had the opportunity to engage with senior vice president DJ Sampath, who leads Cisco’s AI Software and Platform organization. What struck me about his team’s progress is the rapid development cycle that brought AgenticOps to market in under a year. As a former product marketer, I can confidently say that such a timeline is a major accomplishment, and it reflects the innovation momentum continuing under Patel’s leadership. From my perspective, the newly announced AgenticOps platform could become a key driver to help Cisco penetrate deeper into competing infrastructure markets.

Moor Insights & Strategy founder and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead and The Futurum Group’s chief executive Daniel Newman explore further with Sampath in this Six Five Media On The Road conversation from the event.

Additional Portfolio Enhancements Announced At Cisco Live

Several other announcements are worth noting:

• Expansion of Cisco’s smart switch portfolio, specifically the C9350 and C9610, from prior datacenter implementations to campus deployments that include Cisco Silicon One. As the company’s custom silicon continues to permeate its connectivity infrastructure stack and offer meaningful differentiation, it can provide investment protection to a broader set of customers through the programmability of new features and functions. Additionally, the ability to embed network segmentation and security services directly onto switches enhances operational agility.
• Cisco Live Protect, a new security feature aimed at defending against emerging threats targeting AI workloads and applications during runtime. It provides kernel-level OS control for switches and routers, adding another layer of defense.
• A unified fabric experience evolved from Cisco’s UCS platform intended to further enhance Cisco’s networking and security capabilities — while complementing its Nexus cloud management control plane. In my view, these improvements simplify network management via a single pane of glass across Cisco’s wide range of infrastructure offerings. Further strengthening these updates are enhanced Splunk integrations to harness deeper data and network visibility.
• Expansion of Cisco’s Hybrid Mesh Firewall capabilities combined with strong support for universal zero trust network access. The latter is driven by Cisco Secure Access and recent enhancements to Duo Security identity access management (announced prior to Cisco Live U.S.).
• New secure routers and Wi-Fi 7 access points tailored for large venue environments.

I’ve outlined just a few of the networking and security announcements from the conference. That said, I appreciate Cisco’s push toward a scalable platform approach — making it easier for channel partners to sell and deploy the company’s latest offerings and for customers to adopt them.

Cisco’s Room For Growth

As previously mentioned, Cisco’s announcement volume was substantial at Cisco Live. As a result, customers and partners may struggle to absorb everything. The risk is that some of these innovations may get overlooked, and it will be challenging for Cisco to determine which elements should take priority, whether for overall product marketing or in discussions with individual clients. Furthermore, I felt that Cisco’s compute messaging lacked impact during Patel’s keynote. Several Cisco executives I spoke with acknowledged the need to refine their communication, particularly given the company’s objective of delivering full-stack, AI-ready infrastructure through its AI PODs platform, which combines compute and networking to support AI modeling and ML operations. However, I’ll leave deeper analysis of this aspect to my Moor Insights & Strategy colleague Matt Kimball, who specializes in datacenter compute.

Despite some near-term hurdles, I admire the company’s execution around a platform strategy that tackles the challenges enterprises face when deploying AI-ready infrastructure to transform network and security operations. Historically, through Cisco’s parallel organic roadmap and acquisition activities, there has been duplication of functionality — especially in automation. The good news is that its swift embrace of agentic AI is helping consolidate these automation tools, streamlining capabilities through more cohesive product development and go-to-market strategies.

A Comprehensive AI Technology Stack

I see a complete and modern AI infrastructure stack as a three-part foundation encompassing essential compute, networking, and security components. In my opinion, storage should also be considered fundamental, given the demands placed on consolidating data for training both large and small language models. The recent announcements at Cisco Live U.S. touch on all these aspects, enabling enterprises to harness the transformative power of generative and agentic AI applications and workloads securely and at scale.

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