Cisco beefs up secure AI enterprise network architecture

Cisco has embarked on a plan to modernise its campus, branch and industrial networks for the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

The upgrades follow the launch of the company’s AI-ready secure network architecture for enterprises earlier in 2025, and are fundamentally designed to deliver automated deployment and security across highly distributed networks in minutes instead of months, meeting the high-bandwidth, ultra-low latency and intelligent traffic management demands of distributed AI workloads that are increasingly moving to the enterprise edge.

Cisco believes the new products can simplify operations, scale for evolving business needs and enhance security – all critical for unlocking the full potential of enterprise, said Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel. “Cisco delivers the only networking infrastructure that can scale to AI’s exponential growth, while also giving over-worked and under-resourced IT teams truly agentic tools for managing and securing deployments from core to edge,” he said.

Strategically, Cisco said it’s embarking on a transition to AgenticOps, said to represent the future of IT operations where AI-powered agents and human teams work together to solve complex problems before they impact users.

Cisco said its approach to IT management used advanced AI and automation to simplify even the most complex networks. By integrating its proprietary Deep Network Model – a domain-specific large language model – with network technologies into a single, user-friendly platform, Cisco said IT teams can automate routine tasks, quickly troubleshoot issues and gain unified visibility across their entire infrastructure.

Among the key new features is unified network visibility, where a new global overview in a Meraki dashboard provides direct visibility and access to Catalyst Centre-managed networks for a single cloud dashboard experience. This is claimed to simplify network management across campus and branch “radically”, whether cloud-based or on-premise. The product will be in beta in November 2025, and is set to be generally available before the end of the 2025 calendar year.

Campus management simplification will see the introduction of cloud-managed fabric, a scalable and secure architecture to simplify network management. Cloud-managed fabrics are built to reduce the steps required to provision, manage and troubleshoot large sites, while enabling adaptive segmentation policies. Slated for beta in Q4 2025, the feature will likely be generally available in Q1 of 2026.

Available immediately, new agentic workflow automation now spans Meraki, Catalyst Centre, Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, ISE and Nexus, which can be automated and orchestrated with AI Assistant. With a single prompt, AI Assistant can automate previously manual tasks, such as switch migration, Wi-Fi setup and device onboarding.

Built to enable AgenticOps, collaborative AI-powered troubleshooting sees AI Canvas expedite the speed at which NetOps, SecOps and app teams can collaborate with AI Agents to solve cross-domain problems.

Teams can also use the AI Assistant in AI Canvas to troubleshoot a network issue using natural language in seconds by unifying real-time telemetry, AI insights and collaboration into one workspace. The product is now in Alpha.

As IT teams are being asked to move faster than ever before, even as they face rising operational complexity and heightened security concerns caused by gaps between disparate products, new innovations in Cisco Unified Branch are intended to make branch deployments faster and more reliable.

With new automation toolkits, Cisco Validated Designs powered by Agentic Workflows can be used to allow Cisco partners to enable customer IT teams to deploy, scale and secure branches in minutes instead of hours, minimising errors and complexity.