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Cisco CEO talks of increasing trust in AI

Vendor’s AI Summit highlights growth opportunities, but also the barriers that are still holding back wider adoption

Simon Quicke
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Published: 04 Feb 2026 11:45

Cisco’s senior management have warned that artificial intelligence (AI) will not achieve widespread adoption or reach its potential without customers gaining trust in the technology.

The vendor’s CEO, Chuck Robbins, and president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel both spoke at the vendor’s AI Summit, listing trust as one of the main challenges facing the industry.

Not only did that concept refer to securing data and giving customers confidence their systems were not exposed to greater risk, but also that those delivering the technology understood the challenges, and were capable of advising and guiding users through adoption and deployment.

“We all believe 2026 is going to be a turning point for AI, and we believe that this will be the year of agentic applications,” said Robbins. “And we believe that all of us know that the impact on what we do every day is going to change significantly, whether we’re talking to our enterprise customers or governments around the world. We know we have to embrace this. Many of us believe it’s the biggest transition that we’ve ever seen.

“I do believe it will be more revolutionary, and it’s moving faster, obviously, than anything that we’ve ever seen,” he said. “There are lots of questions and discussions about, ‘What does it mean to your enterprise infrastructure? What does it mean to your security posture? What does it mean to application development cycles?’ All those things are really important, and all of us in this room know that those of us who embrace AI will ultimately be the winners.”

Given the potential growth in agentic AI adoption this year, Robbins said there needed to be awareness of the factors that could hold back progress. “One of the deficits that we have in deploying AI, one thing that bothers us, is trust: where there’s trust in what’s going to happen to my data, trust in the models, trust in your infrastructure, trust in the agents, trust in the partners that you’re working with,” he said.

“I’m proud of the trust that we have had over the years with our customers and with governments around the world, and we continue to plan to operate in a way that makes you feel good about working with us and other partners; that we all bring [something] to the table to actually make this a reality,” said Robbins.

Trust holding back wider AI adoption

Patel also touched on the subject in his slot at the event, listing trust as one of the constraints that was holding back wider AI adoption.

“The one question that we constantly keep asking ourselves is, ‘What are the constraints? What are the impediments that actually hold AI back?’ We think there are three major ones.

“The first one is that we have an infrastructure constraint,” he said. “We just don’t have enough power compute and network bandwidth now – memory – you start to think about datacentre shelves to go out and satiate the needs of AI. That’s going to be an area that we are spending billions on at Cisco, and I think the industry is spending, you know, trillions in making sure that we can go out and fulfil the needs of AI.

“The second is the one that Chuck talked about, which is a trust deficit,” said Patel. “We need to make sure that these systems are trusted by the people that are using them, because if you don’t trust these systems, you’ll never use them. We need to make sure that we trust not just using AI for cyber defence, but AI itself.”

The third constraint was around an emerging data gap. With AI models trained on human-generated data that’s publicly available on the internet, he noted that we’re running out of material.

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