Cisco today revealed that it is making the agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework it has developed to automate the delivery of support services available to its partners.

Announced at the Cisco Partner Summit, additional incentives are also being provided to encourage providers of IT services to adopt Cisco IQ for Partners, an edition of an existing framework that promises to reduce the total cost of IT for providers of IT services that are managing Cisco platforms via the Cisco Cloud Control platform for managing operations.

Enhancements to the Cisco IQ AI Assistant also now provide access to real-time data with troubleshooting informed by device diagnostics and Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) knowledge. Additionally, Cisco is providing partners with access to AI-Powered Quantum Safe and Software End of Vulnerability Support (EoVS) playbooks to help identify outage risks, prioritize remediation efforts and scope upgrades or hardening services.

Jeff Schultz, senior vice president for strategy and planning for Cisco, said that as the rate at which vulnerabilities are being discovered continues to accelerate in the AI era, providers of IT services will need to rely more on the AI support platforms provided by vendors to ensure they are able to keep up with remediation requirements. Otherwise, they are likely to be overwhelmed as the pace at which issues are discovered and resolved continues to accelerate, he added.

Cisco claims that it is already providing direct access to Cisco IQ to more than 16,000 customers, with more than 19 million devices onboarded since April 2026. Cisco also makes available role-based access control (RBAC) in Cisco IQ through which end customers can grant partners direct access to their IT environments.

Additionally, Cisco is giving partners access to Model Foundry, an extension to Cisco Cloud Control that provides access to AI models. Cisco is also adding Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for its networking platforms along with ThousandEyes network monitoring integrations for Wi-Fi 6E and 7 access points.

Collectively, the overall size of the Cisco IQ ecosystem should expand considerably as partners expose more of their customers to the AI framework for automating IT operations using the application programming interfaces (APIs) and MCP servers that Cisco provides, noted Schultz.

It’s not clear to what degree other providers of IT platforms will similarly follow suit, but IT teams should assume that their service providers will be augmented by similar capabilities provided by their vendor partners. Those service providers will in all probability then customize those services to address deployments involving platforms and tools from multiple vendors to, hopefully, reduce the number of instances where IT vendors point fingers at each other whenever there is an issue or incident that needs to be resolved.

In the meantime, however, those same IT teams should also assume that as more vulnerabilities are discovered in the age of AI, the need to resolve them as quickly as possible is only going to become that much more of a pressing issue for all concerned.