Cisco is putting AI agents in the hands of every single one of its roughly 90,000 employees starting in July. The rollout represents one of the largest enterprise-wide agentic AI deployments to date, and it’s coming from a company that spent decades building the pipes of the internet before pivoting hard into the pipes of the AI economy.
CFO Mark Patterson, who stepped into the role in July 2025, framed the moment in characteristically dramatic fashion.
“AI is the most significant technology transition that we’ve seen in probably our lifetime, and I think Cisco was right at the heart of it.”
Patterson has spent 26 years at Cisco.
What Cisco is actually building
