Agentic AI is here and Chuck Robbins wants Cisco at the core

Time of India

17-07-2025

At Cisco Live in San Diego this June, the networking giant outlined its most aggressive push yet into AI infrastructure, launching new products aimed at helping enterprises scale agentic AI while tightening control over their cloud environments. 'We're witnessing an unprecedented surge in innovation as organizations embrace agentic AI to automate workflows and solve complex problems,' said Jeetu Patel, President & Chief Product Officer, Cisco, at Cisco Live in San Diego. But it was in a quieter setting—Cisco's Mumbai office weeks later—where President Jeetu Patel and CEO Chuck Robbins laid out the deeper strategic logic behind those announcements, speaking about how enterprise demands are shifting.
Agentic AI—software agents that can independently take actions on behalf of users—is already being deployed across industries. For instance, at Ford Motor Company, the technology is embedded across business functions. 'Agentic AI is being used across Ford's business, from design to engineering to manufacturing and for customer support,' said Patrick Milligan, the company's Chief Information Security Officer at Cisco Live, San Diego. 'As we build, deploy, and manage sophisticated AI capabilities at scale, Cisco's networking and security solutions are an important part of the overall technology infrastructure.'
Reimagining workflows
Speaking in Mumbai, Patel detailed areas where enterprise use cases are gaining traction. 'Every workflow is going to get automated over the next few quarters or years,' he said. 'A lot of the momentum is in coding, second—call centers and customer support where virtual agents are pretty big use case, third that doesn't get talked about enough but is getting a lot of momentum in the US is computing use—where an agent, installed on your computer, will on your behalf go on a browser, give approvals, reserve tickets, basically perform consumer use cases, business to business use cases. Every functional area will be reimagined with AgenticAI.'
Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, leading to a 30% reduction in operational costs. Cisco appears determined to be the backbone behind that transformation.
To support this shift, Cisco launched Secure AI Factory in collaboration with NVIDIA—offering a full stack of infrastructure, security, and AI software to help enterprises deploy and operate agentic AI at scale. It also introduced an expanded range of Cisco AI PODs that support edge AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), model training, and large-scale inferencing with lower TCO and greater control.
As these technologies roll out, CIOs face mounting complexity—from managing fragmented infrastructure to ensuring AI lifecycle security. Cisco is positioning itself as the glue between AI innovation and trusted operational execution.
Cloud: Repatriated or reimagined?
Underneath the AI gold rush, a quieter—but no less significant—trend is reshaping enterprise infrastructure choices:
cloud repatriation
.
According to the Barclays CIO Survey (H1 2024), 83% of enterprise CIOs plan to repatriate at least some workloads by the end of 2024—up from 43% in the second half of 2020.
This strategic pivot means enterprises are reassessing where their workloads should live—whether due to cost, performance, or sovereignty concerns.
Robbins acknowledging the shift said: 'If you think of sovereignty issues, leading countries around the world (are) to build their own data centers, particularly AI applications. That's what we do for a living. We aren't trying to sell anything to you as a service, we are helping you stand up the service with our infrastructure and security. If the trend continues—it is actually good for us.'
Patel offered a nuanced view. 'It is not as much about repatriation but about reaccelerating private clouds,' he said. 'You are not seeing workloads being brought back from the public cloud to the private cloud but new workloads starting to emerge on the private cloud.'
Infrastructure as strategy
For enterprise tech leaders, the message is clear: AI agents will soon automate everything from customer support to internal approvals. Meanwhile, companies are reassessing the public cloud-first mindset that dominated the last decade.
Cisco's bet is that it can meet both demands—with a full-stack, secure, and sovereign-ready platform.
And as Patel put it in Mumbai: 'Every functional area will get reimagined with AgenticAI.'