At its peak in San Diego and across global operations, Cisco is leaning into a bold mission, anchoring enterprise-grade AI through its networking, security, and infrastructure platforms. CEO Chuck Robbins and President Jeetu Patel have made it clear: in the transformative shift toward agentic AI, where systems independently act on behalf of users, Cisco aims to be the foundational backbone behind adoption at scale.

Robbins emphasized that agentic AI is not an incremental transition—it rivals the internet’s explosive growth in speed and impact. In private sessions held in Mumbai, the leadership reiterated a strategic bet on private cloud capabilities over public cloud, citing concerns around control, cost, performance, and data sovereignty. “Private data centers are back,” Robbins declared, aligning Cisco’s direction with sovereign-centric infrastructure demands.

The scope of agentic AI is broad. From code generation and virtual assistants to autonomous operational agents embedded across business functions, AI capabilities are rapidly becoming integral to enterprise day-to-day processes. Cisco is positioning itself as the “picks and shovels provider” in this new AI boom—laying down the infrastructure that will carry and secure intelligent operations .

Differences from prior waves are stark. As more workloads migrate to private clouds and edge nodes, Cisco sees demand shifting away from pure public cloud dependency. Rather than “repatriation,” Cisco highlights a wave of new workloads debuting on private infrastructure. Their argument: hybrid sovereignty demands amplify the value of resilient, secure networking closer to home.

Security is woven into every layer. Cisco emphasizes that agentic AI could introduce new vulnerabilities—demanding integrated networking and security. Their dual-stack approach, combining programmable silicon, unified control planes, and telemetry from Splunk, is meant to deliver high-performance infrastructure that can adapt, secure, and scale alongside AI agents.

As enterprises navigate complexity, Cisco‘s narrative is clear—AI demands a new infrastructure paradigm: secure, programmable, network-centric. Their rise as an indispensable layer in the agentic AI stack reflects a broader shift: success in this era depends not just on intelligent applications, but on the networks that sustain and secure them.