sdecoret - stock.adobe.com
Cisco: Legacy networks can no longer support the new AI workforce
At Cisco Connect 2026 Singapore, tech leaders and policymakers warn that businesses must modernise their IT infrastructure and governance frameworks to pave the way for agentic AI
As enterprises integrate artificial intelligence (AI) agents and physical AI into their businesses, they are doing so on legacy networks that are unequipped to handle machine-speed demands.
That was according to Tay Bee Kheng, president of Cisco ASEAN, who noted in her opening address at Cisco Connect 2026 Singapore that the “infrastructure we built for today is like a road network that is built for bicycles.”
“The chatbot has only intermittent pressure and demand on your network. Agents will have a sustained and persistent demand on your infrastructure. Infrastructure that is made for a human click on the network is not applicable for AI agents anymore,” she added.
Beyond supporting the higher bandwidth and latency requirements of AI agents, Tay noted that organisations must also be ready to onboard as many as 10 agents for every employee, adding a daunting perspective on the AI wave: “There’s no HR system for that at this moment.”
With agentic AI capable of reasoning, planning, and acting across supply chains and operations, security teams will also need to grapple with agents that do not authenticate or behave like human employees, creating a blind spot for traditional IT operations.
During a media briefing, Robert Pizzari, group vice-president of Asia at Splunk (now a Cisco company), warned of the risks of shadow AI, where employees deploy unsanctioned foundation models or give AI agents privileges they shouldn’t have.
Cisco is tackling the problem with its AI observability stack, bolstered by the recent acquisition of Galileo, which allows enterprises to monitor model drift and agent behaviour. “Inevitably, shadow AI will be a feature and a function, so we also need to ensure that organisations have the ability to hit the handbrake,” Pizzari said.
Koo Juan Huat, Cisco ASEAN’s director of cyber security, stressed that treating AI agents with the same zero-trust architecture used for human employees is the only way forward.
Aligning with the Government Technology Agency of Singapore’s recent move to build an AI agent registry for public officers, Koo pointed out three things that enterprises will need to do to secure AI agents: know the agents on your network, know what they are authorised to do, and implement strict guardrails.
“You need to be able to look at what the agent is doing and give it permission just in time and just enough to do what it needs to do,” Koo explained. “A human needs to come into the loop and authenticate and authorise the action.”
Fighting frontier AI with frontier AI
As organisations deploy AI, so do threat actors. Rahayu Mahzam, Singapore’s minister of state for digital development and information, used her address at the event to remind the industry that the AI-powered voice phishing attacks that cloned CEO voices in 2025 are no longer hypothetical risks.
“Agentic AI is here – AI that doesn’t just respond, but reasons, plans, and acts,” Rahayu said. “But with accelerating capabilities and automation come new digital and cyber risks. AI agents that act without sufficient oversight can cause real harm.”
To stay ahead of the threat landscape, Cisco is using frontier AI to defend the enterprise. Through Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, Cisco used frontier AI models, including Claude Mythos, to scan 1.8 billion lines of code across more than 25 programming languages in just eight weeks, achieving a false positive rate of under 3%.
But Cisco executives acknowledge that the industry’s security landscape is too fragmented. To close the gap, Cisco is open-sourcing its AI security and safety frameworks to help the wider ecosystem build secure agentic AI systems.
These include DefenseClaw, an open-source framework that scans, sandboxes, and inventories AI agents, their skills and their model context protocol (MCP) connections before they're allowed to run. One of its components, CodeGuard, performs static analysis on agent-generated code to flag vulnerabilities.
Upskilling people
Ultimately, the most advanced technology is only as trustworthy as the humans who govern it. At the event, Rahayu announced a three-year memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Cisco and the Digital Defence Alliance Singapore (DDAS) to develop joint training programmes in AI and cyber security.
The initiative aims to level the playing field in AI upskilling, creating practical learning opportunities for youths and working professionals. Already, polytechnic students from the DDAS community are scheduled to visit Cisco’s Tokyo office this October to learn about network security in Japan’s commercial IT industry, following a similar trip to Seoul in April 2026.
“The question is no longer whether AI will transform the way we work. It already has,” Rahayu concluded. “The question is whether we are ready to lead that transformation – with skill, with security, and with trust at the centre.”
Read more about AI in ASEAN
- The Filipino government will equip public servants with Gemini Enterprise AI tools, launch a cross-agency cyber defence alliance and upgrade subsea network infrastructure
- From internal hackathons to accelerator programmes, Singapore’s AngelHack is empowering everyday employees to build their own AI applications while expanding its reach in the US, Brazil and Australia.
- Agoda has set its sights on becoming an AI-powered travel companion as it changes how it builds software and moves its tech workforce into a new facility in Bangkok.
- Digital Realty expands Southeast Asian footprint beyond Singapore and Jakarta, acquiring a connectivity hub in Malaysia’s Cyberjaya with plans for a 14MW campus to support regional AI and cloud workloads.
