Cisco outlines agentic AI ops plans via Cloud Control, Cisco IQ

Cisco launched Cisco Cloud Control, which unified its platforms for agentic AI operations, multiple security advances and Cisco IQ, an AI-driven support and services effort.

The company, which is benefiting from the AI infrastructure buildout, outlined its efforts at Cisco Live in Las Vegas. Cisco Live has a heavy dose of tools for agentic AI and security operations.

In many respects, Cisco Live 2026 is about putting the various parts of the company acquired or grown organically together.

During his keynote, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said the pace of change is unprecedented due to AI and multiple moving parts. Robbins said:

"Every technology revolution we've seen has been ultimately dependent upon the network. The buzz we hear around GPUs is incredibly important. The models are incredibly important. Inference is incredibly important. The apps, the agentic revolution and Mythos. They're all nodes, though, and they're super powerful independently, but they're massively more powerful when they're networked."

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Robbins said there is a massive modernization effort underway due to AI. "I believe we are truly going to deliver the critical infrastructure for the AI era," said Robbins.

Here's a look at what Cisco launched.

Cisco Cloud Control

In many ways, Cisco Cloud Control is an effort to make the company's AI operations vision real. Cisco is a company of multiple units including networking, security, compute and observability. The issue? Each of these units have their own platform.

With Cisco Cloud Control, the company is offering a single environment and data layer across all offerings. Cisco Cloud Control will also connect to AWS, Linear, Microsoft, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack and Google Cloud including Wiz.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, said Cisco Cloud Control is designed for AI agent and human workflows. "AI agents reason and act continuously at software speed, and that changes everything about how we scale, manage, and defend our critical infrastructure," said Patel.

If the concept of Cisco Cloud Control sounds familiar, it's because it is. Multiple enterprises are aiming to be the single control plane for AI operations. Cisco, however, has a massive footprint and enterprises are also looking toward on-premise AI, which is supported in Cisco Cloud Control. Key parts include:

• Cross-domain telemetry to track data flowing across networking, security, observability and collaboration.
• Purpose-built models that can reason through problems and mix and match models. Models cover the frontier LLM bases and include Cisco's Deep Network Model.
• AI agents to operate across Cisco infrastructure to spot issues, identify causes, fix them and deploy with human approval. Agents will be able to leverage Cisco's portfolio of offerings including agentic workflows, digital twins and experience metrics.
• Cisco AI Canvas, which is a workspace for human operators and AI can leverage data and context to resolve problems.
• Cloud Control Studio, a design space that includes Agent Builder to build AI agents, and App Builder, which integrates with OpenAI Codex.

Security enhancements

Cisco said that it is building its security systems for what it calls the "Mythos era" that has collapsed the window between vulnerability and exploit. As a result, Cisco, a member of Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI's Daybreak, is arguing that security needs to be real time.

Robbins said:

“AI changes the speed of defense. The bad corollary to that is it's empowering our adversaries at a pace that we've never seen in our careers. It's become very real with models like Mythos.

We really need to work together to think about how we defend against these emerging threats, and how we make sure that we build that architecture in a way that allows us to spend more time talking about the benefits of AI.”

Launches include:

• Live Protect, which is billed as a digital immune system for Cisco products. Live Protect prioritizes vulnerabilities and fixes them without reboots, upgrades and maintenance. Live Protect is available in N9000 series switches and Nexus One with expansion to more products in the future.
• Enhancements to its AI Defense and Zero Trust for agents.
• Quantum-safe communications advances across Cisco with most of the portfolio covered by December. Quantum-safe will be the default for new infrastructure. The company also launched Quantum Ready Assessments, which will be delivered through Cisco IQ to identify assets exposed to harvest now, decrypt later attacks. These assessments will be available in July. Cisco also launched a Quantum Resilience Framework.

Cisco resilience

Cisco also outlined new services that will resolve around resiliency. The company launched resilient infrastructure services to gauge exposure, modernization and defense resilience.

According to Cisco, Cisco IQ will be integrated into Cisco Cloud Control and feature insights, playbooks and education.

In addition, Cisco IQ will support on-premises deployments and peer benchmarking