Cisco Live 26: Networks the key in post-Mythos world
Platform offers unified approach for humans and AI agents to run critical IT infrastructure together, allowing customers to build their own apps and agents in natural language
Organisations are depending on both humans and artificial intelligence (AI) to manage, monitor and defend critical IT infrastructure – and in an agentic world, they must act and defend at machine speed and scale.
To facilitate these ever stringent requirements, Cisco has unveiled Cloud Control, a unified platform built for humans and AI agents that is claimed to represent a new way to run critical infrastructure.
In its technological essence, Cisco Cloud Control comprises a single management plane that brings a customer’s entire estate into one environment. It can deliver a single view of Cisco networking, security, compute, observability and collaboration in one environment.
People and agents work from a single data layer, sharing the same operational context and the same system of action, offering one platform for humans and agents to run the agentic enterprise, while humans stay in control, said Cisco.
The new platform was unveiled at Cisco Live 2026 where it was described by president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel as a “revolutionary” way to control infrastructure and operations – allowing customers to build their own apps and agents in natural language, extending to third-party tools – and one that was developed by a company that is very different to what it used to be, even compared with the most recent past.
Kicking off the conference, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said that from a technological, geo-political and business perspective, the world was moving faster than at any time before.
“We’re in a full-out sprint. In the world we live in today, in the last half hour a new model could have been launched and we’d all be scrambling; an attacker might have taken down some major system; some political statement could have caused a seismic shift in the global geopolitical landscape. This is what we’re dealing with.”
A key driver of this change was the release of the Mythos AI tool, revealing companies’ strengths and weaknesses in the AI era. One major result has been the increased engagement of CEOs in technology decision-making. Robbins was adamant that traditions and norms have gone for his fellow CEOs as they try to meet the Mythos moment and simply have to invest in step change technologies.
The old habit of slowing spending and seeing what happens in times of change just doesn’t work any more, he said, adding that there was a real risk of “becoming extinct” by doing this now.
“I’m talking to CEOs who are trying to understand the implications of something they haven’t put their hands on yet, and so they feel a lack of control,” said Robbins. “At the CEO level, they’re just trying to figure out, ‘What are the things I should I be doing, what should I be expecting of my team, and how should I be guiding my team?’. The risk of not [investing in new infrastructure] is much greater. In general, you’re going to find that most CEOs feel exactly that way, even though they may not know how to operationalise that yet.
“FOMO [fear of missing out] is real, and the fear of competitors moving faster because they’re willing to embrace something and take a little more risk than is at the heart of the discussions we’re having right now. If you look at most of the demand signals on infrastructure right now, we are supply constrained, but this infrastructure is being consumed. It’s not like you’re going up and building out infrastructure like in the previous eras.”
Supporting powerful network with Cloud Control
At the heart of Robbins’s speech was the basic notion that the network was now more powerful than any of the nodes which connect to it. Recalling the days in the past decade when the explosion of online video services put incredible strain on networks that needed upgrading, Robbins noted that network traffic associated with AI will triple in the next three years – and that forecast was based solely on what we know today.
“We have robotics, we have manufacturing, we have physical AI – all those things are going to put traffic on the networks at an incredible pace. Over 90% of [attendees] have said, ‘I’ve got to be modernising my technology infrastructure today. I’ve got to make my network more resilient. I’ve got to be ready for this transition.’ We’re working on it. I think the power of this network...is going to be more important than ever.”
For Cisco, the key technology reference point will be Cloud Control. The platform brings together cross-domain telemetry, purpose-built models and trusted agents. Within the former, data flowing across networking, security, observability and collaboration can be combined so that humans and agents can act on the same information across to address business imperatives such as uptime, agent behaviour and tokenomics.
As it works with AI models, Cloud Control looks to reason across complex problems with the right mix of purpose-built and frontier models, especially those with operational networking data. The result is said to be system intelligence that scales with the complexity of the problem, not the size of the model alone.
“AI agents reason and act continuously at software speed, and that changes everything about how we scale, manage and defend our critical infrastructure,” added Patel. “Cisco Cloud Control is a command centre for agentic AI: a platform where your team and your AI agents work together, in the same environment, with the same information and with humans in control.”
Through Cisco Cloud Control, operators will be able to work with autonomous agents that can follow a structured path from signal to action. Benefits are said to include spotting trouble, identifying causes, carrying out fixes, testing changes before deployment and confirming the user experience has recovered.
Such agents will be powered by Cisco telemetry and purpose-built models, using other capabilities such as expanded experience metrics, deep reasoning, digital twin and Cisco Agentic Workflows. The company said that teams will be able to automate network ops with an agentic loop, while keeping actions visible and governed.
As they build their own applications and agents using natural language directly within the Cisco Cloud Control platform, users can also connect to an IT ecosystem including AWS, Linear, ServiceNow and Slack.
Other products introduced at Cisco Live include AI Canvas, a multiplayer, generative workspace where operators and agents work from the same live evidence to investigate and resolve issues together in real time. The working premise is that context persists across shifts and escalations, so nothing is lost, and nothing is repeated.
Cloud Control Studio forms a design space that unlocks two customisation environments. Agent Builder lets customers build agents for Cloud Control tailored to their own policies and workflows, with the ability to connect to more than 50+ third-party platforms and tools through native connectors or the open Model Context Protocol (MCP). In contrast, App Builder lets customers build and publish apps and workflows for Cloud Control from natural-language prompts, with OpenAI Codex’s agentic coding assistant built in.
Everything built in Studio – plus agents and apps from across Cisco’s ecosystem – can be published to Cloud Control Marketplace.
The shrinking window between vulnerability and exploit
Looking to address what it said was security for the Mythos era fused directly into the infrastructure, Cisco warned that reactive defence was no longer enough when the window between vulnerability and exploit has collapsed from weeks to minutes. The company highlighted that as a charter member of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s Daybreak, it stress-tests its own products using the latest frontier AI models, finding the weaknesses adversaries would have found before they can use them.
At the show, Cisco said that it was expanding protections across its infrastructure to shield customers from new vulnerabilities following discovery, with Cisco Cloud Control acting as the security command centre where defence plays out in real time.
The Live Protect system acts as a digital immune system for Cisco products, looking to shield users from newly discovered and prioritised vulnerabilities for supported platforms at runtime. This is carried out without reboots, no upgrades and no maintenance windows. Hybrid Mesh Firewall extends unified protection across networks and applications as well as Cisco and third-party firewalls. This is intended to limit the blast radius when something goes wrong.
Looking to “protect agents from the world, and the world from agents”, Cisco has now made further enhancements across its agentic security offerings, from AI defence to zero trust for agents, to the agentic SOC.
In addition, attempting to provide a path to quantum-safe infrastructure, addressing “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks that collect encrypted data to unlock when quantum capabilities catch up, Cisco has introduced Quantum-safe communications advancements across its core portfolio, extending post-quantum protection to the systems where the most sensitive enterprise traffic flows.
Effective immediately, all newly launched enterprise and data centre routers, switches and firewall series will launch with quantum-safe secure boot. New quantum-ready assessments identify the assets most exposed to the “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks and where to start to remediate. A new quantum resilience framework gives enterprises a structured approach to post-quantum cryptography across two pillars: quantum-safe communications and quantum-safe products.
To help customers introduce long-term resilience in its infrastructure, Cisco Services announced four new capabilities through Cisco IQ, namely resilient infrastructure services, AI-powered delivery vehicle for support and professional services, data sovereignty requirements and peer benchmarking.
The aim is that the solution helps customers mitigate risk from frontier model threats and build the long-term resilience that today’s threat landscape demands. Data sovereignty requirements now have on-premise deployment options. Peer Benchmarking uses anonymised data to provide data-driven insights on areas such as Last Day of Support (LDOS) risk exposure and security vulnerability rates, enabling comparison with organisations of similar size, sector or infrastructure profile.
Concluding, Robbins was confident that the IT and networking delegates to Cisco Live would be the architects of how AI reshapes industries, organisations, whether they were designing factory systems, making classrooms more personalised and productive, or helping science analyse data and advance disease cures. The key, Robbins said, was the network transforming customer experience and powering “incredible outcomes”.
“The power of the network brings all of it together, makes it happen, and together we have this incredible responsibility and opportunity to build infrastructure in a way that makes AI useful, secure, trusted and real,” he added.
“Collectively, I believe we are truly going to deliver the critical infrastructure for the AI era. Despite all the uncertainty and despite all the fear, I believe that we will together meet this moment.”
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