‘Cisco now is delivering that critical infrastructure for the AI era’: Cisco's infrastructure unification push aims to simplify management for the agentic era

Cisco aims to consolidate and simplify infrastructure management to compensate for rapid AI advances and surging customer demands, according to the company’s UK&I CTO.

Speaking to ITPro following the company’s annual Cisco Live event, Rob Lay said a slew of announcements made at the conference last week intend to shore up infrastructure optimization capabilities for enterprises.

Chief among these announcements was the launch of the Cisco Cloud Control platform, which aims to consolidate disparate infrastructure management platforms through a single interface.

The move here, according to Lay, comes in direct response to the growing sprawl of disparate, overlapping solutions enterprises contend with, be that from Cisco itself, or third parties.

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“Cloud Control is all about bringing together all of those different management platforms that we've got, because we've got a really broad portfolio, bringing together the likes of Catalyst Center and Meraki Dashboard and Nexus One, and the Collab Command Center, and Cisco Security Cloud Control,” he told ITPro.

“All of those pieces, you’re bringing all that together so you’ve got that single point of management.”

Cisco describes the platform as a “new way” to run critical infrastructure that ties together five key elements, including:

• Cross-domain telemetry
• Purpose-built models
• Trusted agents
• Cloud Control Studio
• Cisco AI Canvas

The launch of Cisco Cloud Control is the culmination of several years’ worth of evolution for the networking giant, according to Lay. Indeed, Cisco has been moving consistently toward a “platform approach” when it comes to network and infrastructure management.

“We've talked for a couple of years now about this idea of platform, and I think that it becomes very, very difficult to really have a true platform until you've got that consolidated management capability,” he added.

While in previous years this focus was spurred on by evolving cloud demands, particularly the shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud setups, the advent of generative, and more recently agentic, AI required somewhat of a rethink.

The performance demands of agentic AI are huge, Lay told ITPro. This means performance, stability, and consistency of cloud and networking capabilities are now paramount.

Running parallel to the performance requirements, enterprises are also dealing with an increasingly sprawling array of agents working behind the scenes, which again requires an overhaul of visibility and the ability to track, monitor, and orchestrate these autonomous bots.

“I think it's also driven by the landscape that we're seeing from an AI perspective as well. We can't get through a conversation these days without mentioning AI, but when you look at the challenges that our customers are facing – the need to be able to adapt, manage, respond to stuff at much, much faster speeds is driving a necessity,” he explained.

“We can't have customers bouncing from console to console to console anymore. So it's about bringing together all those different capabilities [and] unifying that experience for our customers.”

Cisco’s ‘AgenticOps’ push

Agentic AI certainly is a key factor in why Cisco customers are demanding more intuitive, unified management capabilities in 2026, Lay told ITPro.

Indeed, the Cloud Control Panel represents the underlying foundation for the firm’s ‘AgenticOps’ operating model. The company envisages a future where humans and agents are working together “side by side”, and the features rolled out by the company aim to simplify adoption.

The firm’s Agent Builder tool, for example, enables users to build custom agents for Cloud Control “tailored to their own policies and workflows”. These can be connected to more than 50 third-party platforms, either through native connectors, or the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Elsewhere, the App Builder also allows enterprises to build and publish applications and workflows for Cloud Control using natural language prompts. This, the company noted, is based on OpenAI's Codex agent.

Tackling AI’s “network problem”

While agentic AI features and customization capabilities are a key focus for Cisco, Lay noted that Cisco’s bread and butter, networking, is the area in which it’s still emphasizing the importance of relying on high-performance capabilities.

Customers have worked their way through the early days of the generative AI boom, which was dominated by chatbots, and with agents, they’re now focusing heavily on delivering clear-cut use cases that “add value to their organizations”.

Throughout this process, he noted, it’s become clear that “AI rapidly becomes a network problem”.

“It's really, really difficult to enable an AI platform to work properly unless you've got that very highly capable network that underpins it all,” he explained.

“It is kind of true to say that Cisco now is delivering that critical infrastructure for the AI era, because regardless of whether we’re talking about the data center network and the need to connect to GPUs, whether we’re talking about the fact that we’ve got customers, service providers, and hyperscalers now building data centers further and further apart - how do we work to that?”

With the previous generation of generative AI focused largely around chatbots, network traffic typically “spiked” in short bursts. With agentic AI always on and running away in the background, that “profile just goes up and stays high in terms of network demand”.

“That puts a very different challenge and requirement on the network to deliver that real consistent high efficiency, high quality network connectivity,” he said.

Lay said these fundamental “network challenge” issues have prompted Cisco to drive networking innovation in recent years to enable it to meet surging customer demand.

Part of the challenge here, he noted, has been emphasizing that customers simply cannot continue “sweating assets” if they’re to have success with agentic AI (and remain secure).

In a recent discussion with a customer, Lay revealed an IT leader boasted about having a Catalyst Switch that had been “up for 12 years”.

“That’s great, right? That shows our kit is reliable and stable, but in today’s world that’s quite a risk for our customers, not just from a security perspective, but fundamentally, it’s not going to support any of the sort of network traffic types that you need for today,” he told ITPro.

Customer mindsets are shifting on this front, Lay added, and this is an area Cisco is keen to capitalize on and keep pace with.

“When they’re looking at refreshing their technology, they’re not just looking for the current in-support version of what they had previously, they’re looking at what do we need our network to do in two years’ time, in three years’ time,” he commented.

“That’s what we need to be planning for and investing for today.”

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