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Cisco $CSCO +3.33% unveiled a unified platform on Monday that lets businesses build and deploy AI agents to manage and defend their IT infrastructure, as cybersecurity threats increasingly arrive from automated systems acting at machine speed.

The platform, called Cisco Cloud Control, was announced at the company's Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas. It gives operators a single login and shared view across networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration, allowing human teams and AI agents to work from the same data layer, the company said.

"You can no longer do things at human scale," DJ Sampath, senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform at Cisco, told Reuters. "It has to be machine scale, from an operational perspective."

Named Cisco Cloud Control, the system is built to let businesses and governments deploy AI agents capable of monitoring their infrastructure, neutralizing threats, and ejecting intruders, along with a range of other defensive functions. Cisco executives told Reuters that the shift reflects a new reality in which attackers are deploying waves of automated agents, making a machine-speed response from IT defenders no longer optional.