In the latest episode of Cisilion’s Beyond the Tech podcast, Nathan Ashby is joined by Ian Perry and Craig Hawley for a deep dive into everything announced at Cisco Live in Amsterdam.
From AI powered innovation to next generation network hardware, this year’s event showcased Cisco’s vision for the future of collaboration, infrastructure and secure AI adoption.
AI at the centre of Cisco’s strategy
AI dominated the week, but the team were quick to point out that this is no longer hype. Cisco are building AI into existing products to improve real-world outcomes, while also providing the infrastructure that helps customers build their own AI solutions.
Two themes came through strongly:
1. AI that enhances current Cisco platforms
Think meeting room intelligence, smarter troubleshooting and new AI assistants baked into Webex, Contact Centre and Catalyst management tools. These build on years of machine learning capability already present in Cisco devices.
2. Infrastructure designed for customers’ own AI workloads
From silicon to switching to compute, Cisco are investing heavily in the foundations that organisations need to run large language models and agentic AI securely and at scale.
Smarter collaboration with AI powered assistants
The team highlighted the growing maturity of Webex AI features. Cisco devices already use Nvidia chipsets for capabilities such as noise removal and intelligent framing, but these advances are now extending into:
- AI Director for automatic multi-camera room views
- Virtual agents capable of handling real digital or voice conversations
- Real-time assistants that guide contact centre agents with prompts, procedures and compliance steps
- Well-being features that detect stress and automatically pause call queues
These enhancements improve consistency, reduce onboarding effort and support better customer experiences.
AI driven networking and infrastructure
Craig shared insights from the infrastructure sessions, including how Cisco are applying AI to core networking operations.
One standout was the AI Assistant for ACI and Catalyst Center, which can read a customer’s actual configuration, analyse YAML files, troubleshoot errors and recommend safe changes. This reduces time to resolution and gives engineers a reliable technical soundboard.
Cisco also emphasised the strong security controls underpinning all AI features, including data sovereignty commitments and strict guardrails to stop customer data being used to train public models.
Building modern AI ready data centres
Cisco Live revealed a series of updates across data centre networking and compute:
- New Nexus switches and optics, including 1.6 Tbps water cooled hardware for high bandwidth GPU environments
- Silicon One advancements, focused on performance and energy efficiency
- AI Pods and large-scale GPU networking support, enabling GPU-to-GPU communication with low latency
- Unified Edge, a new compute platform that combines server, routing, switching and security in one appliance for branch or retail environments
Unified Edge is designed for organisations without on-site data centres, but is flexible enough to run anything from LLMs to local workloads such as building management systems.
SASE, SSE and secure traffic for the AI era
Cisco also announced updates to their SASE platform, including:
- Lower seat minimums, opening the solution to more organisations
- Enhancements to classify and manage AI traffic flows
- A roadmap towards unified policy control through Cisco Security Cloud Control
The team discussed how traffic patterns are changing with the rise of LLMs, making intelligent control and routing essential.
Towards a unified Cisco management experience
Historically, Cisco customers have juggled multiple portals across networking, collaboration and security. While a single pane of glass is not here yet, Cisco are making significant progress.
Examples include:
- A unified Webex Control Hub for collaboration, calling and contact centre
- Meraki style design patterns appearing across new platforms
- Hyperfabric for Nexus configuration through a SaaS based GUI
- Cisco Security Cloud Control for security-wide policy management
- Early foundations for the future Cisco Cloud Control platform
The journey is ongoing, but the direction is clear.
Hardware innovation across the board
Both Ian and Craig called out new device launches that showcase Cisco’s engineering focus on sustainability and flexibility:
- Codec Pro G2 with reduced materials, lower weight and integrated PoE for AV over IP
- Desk Pro G2 with a dual-lens camera for huddle spaces and USB hub functionality
- Catalyst 9000 series enhancements, with Cisco reaffirming long-term support and adding features to existing models
- Energy efficiency improvements, including office hours for room devices and granular power controls on switches
These updates are designed to extend device lifecycles, reduce carbon impact and lower operational costs.
For a full walk-through of Cisco Live announcements and how these innovations can help organisations adopt AI securely and modernise their infrastructure, listen to the latest episode of the Beyond the Tech podcast.