rewrite this title Cisco overhauls its infrastructure stack as the agentic AI race heats up – UC Today

Cisco used its annual Live conference in Las Vegas this week to make a broad push into agentic AI, launching a unified infrastructure management platform alongside a raft of networking, security and observability announcements aimed at enterprises grappling with how to run IT environments increasingly populated by autonomous AI agents.

The centrepiece is Cisco Cloud Control, which brings together the company’s networking, security, compute, observability and collaboration products — including Meraki, Nexus, Intersight, Splunk and Collaboration — under a single interface, allowing human operators and AI agents to work from shared data and shared context.

“It’s no longer about humans clicking through dashboards, in a multitude of dashboards, trying to keep up with what the agents are doing,” said DJ Sampath, Cisco’s Senior VP and GM for AI software and platform, during a press briefing at the event.

“A true collaborative operating model starts when agents are doing the heavy lifting and humans are constantly staying in control of what matters.”

The core of Cloud Control is AI Canvas, a collaborative workspace where operators and agents investigate and resolve incidents together using live infrastructure data.

An actions queue surfaces recommendations, root cause analyses and confidence scores for human review before any change is made.

Cisco says context persists across shifts and escalations, removing the need to reconstruct the picture every time a new team member picks up an issue.

A design environment called Cloud Control Studio is targeted for late 2026, giving customers and partners the ability to build custom agents and applications directly within the platform.

Agent Builder connects to more than 50 third-party platforms via native connectors or the Model Context Protocol, while App Builder embeds OpenAI’s Codex for natural language-driven workflow creation.

A Cloud Control Marketplace launches with integrations spanning IT service management tools including ServiceNow and Atlassian, identity providers including Okta, Microsoft Entra ID and Ping Identity, and AI platforms including Anthropic, OpenAI and NVIDIA.

Cisco is not charging separately for Cloud Control. The platform is included in existing tiers of its Cisco 360 partner programme, with the expectation that partners monetise through services rather than licences.

“The commercial opportunity is in using Cisco Cloud Control to expand and deepen the customer relationships partners already have, rather than selling it as a standalone product,” said Alex Pujols, VP of Global Partner Engineering.

Networking Goes Autonomous

On the networking side, Cisco announced Agentic Actions for campus and branch networks, entering beta via Meraki in June. The feature follows a closed loop: sense, diagnose, remediate, validate, deploy. A Digital Twin capability, entering alpha in July, runs an emulated replica of the production network using actual software images rather than a mathematical model, allowing agents to test changes before they go live.

Cisco also announced Multicloud Fabric, a cloud-delivered service connecting branches, data centres and cloud workloads across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and neocloud providers without requiring customer-side hardware. It includes zero trust routing, cloud firewall service chaining and built-in ThousandEyes and Splunk observability. “It’s instantly available, configured seamlessly with one button in Cisco Cloud Control, and it stitches all of this connectivity in minutes,” said Anurag Dhingra, senior vice president and general manager for enterprise connectivity and collaboration.

Security and Identity For Agents

Cisco is expanding Live Protect, its runtime vulnerability shielding feature, to campus and branch smart switches, with secure routers to follow later in the year. The feature applies compensating controls to running devices without reboots or maintenance windows.

On identity, Cisco is introducing Agentic IAM, an ephemeral access model delivered through Cisco Secure Access that scopes permissions to a specific task rather than assigning standing roles.

Splunk and the Agentic SOC

Cisco’s Data Fabric, powered by Splunk, received significant updates. A federated search capability now queries data across environments without requiring it to be moved or copied into Splunk. An AI Toolkit Agent Builder adds domain-specific models for machine data operations, and a Turnkey Machine Data Lake automates schema management using AI.

Built on top, an Agentic SOC deploys purpose-built security agents covering detection and response.

Cisco also confirmed new hardware at the event, including the C9550 Core switch, 8100 to 8600 series Secure Routers, outdoor Wi-Fi 7 access points, the IR1000 industrial router and the Cisco Board Pro G3.

Global availability for Cloud Control has not been confirmed. The platform remains in controlled availability in the US while Cisco works through its initial cohort of customers and partners.