Five takeaways from the Cisco Live keynotes
At Cisco Systems Inc.‘s annual event, Cisco Live, this week in Las Vegas, it was no surprise that artificial intelligence was the top theme of the show and dominated most of the news and product innovations announced.
Cisco has been successful in riding the AI wave and using it as a growth engine. Over the past year, revenue and profits have grown, and the stock price has doubled. The company has accomplished this by positioning itself as “critical infrastructure for the AI era” and by revamping its entire product line to back that claim.
As customers move from AI pilots to production, the value of the network will continue to grow because AI is inherently a network service. During his Day 1 keynote, Jeetu Patel (pictured), Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer, framed the challenge: “Humans click, but agents swarm.” As this shift occurs, spiky, human-led chatbot traffic will give way to consistently higher volumes of network traffic from swarms of autonomous agents running at machine speed, which will stress every part of the technology environment.
Liz Centoni, executive vice president and general manager for applications and customer experience, carried that theme into day two from a different angle: “I’m not here to talk about the future of AI, but what I am here to talk about is the boring problems it’s already fixing for you in your environment.” Her message was that Cisco’s AI story is not just about graphics processing units and glossy demos; it’s about using AI to fix the operational drudgery customers face every day.
