Cisco used its Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas to promote a new platform strategy aimed at helping enterprises manage infrastructure shaped by autonomous AI agents.

The company’s Cisco Cloud Control is a management platform built to bring networking, security, compute, observability and collaboration systems into a single operational environment. Cloud Control is intended to serve both human admins and AI agents, an acknowledgement that in today’s enterprise, software agents continuously interact with both business systems and their human managers.

Cisco is offering “a relatively easy ‘Lego’ approach to many organizations that may have difficulty deploying AI and agentic AI solutions on their own,” said Jack Gold, President of J. Gold Associates.

“By leveraging its large installed base of networking and connectivity solutions that dominate the hyperscaler cloud and enterprise industries, as well as significant enhanced capabilities available with the acquisition of Splunk, Cisco is in a good position to extend that reach for the emerging AI, hybrid AI, and especially the agentic AI world.”

AgenticOps

Cisco executives note that traditional management tools were built for human operators and are not optimized for AI systems running at machine speed. The company’s response is what it calls AgenticOps, a model that combines automation with human oversight.

Cloud Control provides a unified view of infrastructure through a single login and shared data layer built on Cisco’s Data Fabric, which incorporates Splunk technology. The platform combines telemetry from networking, security and application environments with specialized AI models trained on Cisco’s infrastructure data.

AI agents operating through Cloud Control can identify issues, determine root causes, recommend corrective actions, test changes in digital replicas of production environments and validate outcomes before deployment. Cisco emphasized that human operators retain approval authority and policy controls.

A key component of the platform is Cloud Control Studio, which enables organizations to create custom applications and AI agents using natural language prompts. The environment supports integrations with more than 50 third-party platforms through native connectors and the Model Context Protocol. Supported ecosystems include AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, PagerDuty and Slack.

Cisco also expanded AI Canvas, a collaborative workspace where operators and AI agents work from shared operational data. The company said investigation context remains available across staff shift changes and escalations to higher support levels, reducing duplicated work.

AI systems are generating far larger infrastructure demands than legacy software. Cisco cited internal research indicating that agentic AI workflows can create roughly 450% more network traffic than equivalent human-driven processes, with much of that activity spanning multiple cloud environments.

Cisco Cloud Control enters availability in the US immediately, with global availability planned later.

Extending Security Capabilities

On the security front, Cisco expanded Live Protect, a feature that applies security controls to running infrastructure without requiring reboots or software upgrades. Previously introduced for Nexus 9000 switches, the technology will now support additional networking products, including campus and branch deployments.

Advances in frontier AI models have dramatically shortened the time between vulnerability discovery and active exploitation. The company is responding by embedding defensive measures directly into infrastructure and using AI-assisted testing programs to spot weaknesses before attackers can exploit them.

Cisco also introduced additional security controls for AI agents, including agent discovery, task-specific access permissions and governance tools to restrict what agents can access and change. Cisco’s Agentic SOC uses AI agents to automate portions of incident investigation and response workflows.

Cisco also launched Resilient Infrastructure Services, combining exposure assessments, infrastructure modernization planning and resilience programs to help customers adapt to emerging AI-driven threats.

Quantum Readiness

Cisco committed to enabling quantum-safe communications across most of its core product portfolio by the end of 2026. Newly introduced routers, switches and firewall platforms will ship with quantum-safe secure boot capabilities enabled by default.

To help companies prepare for future cryptographic threats, Cisco debuted Quantum Ready Assessments through its Cisco IQ platform. The service identifies systems vulnerable to so-called harvest now, decrypt later attacks, where attackers collect encrypted data today with the expectation that future quantum computers will eventually break current encryption methods.