Cisco Unveils Cloud Control Platform As AI Agents Reshape Enterprise Networks

Every year at Cisco Live U.S., I sit down with the people who keep hospitals running, power grids stable, and banks secure. The IT teams who get called at 2 a.m. The security crews racing against attackers who never clock out.

This year feels different. The pace of change over the last 18 months has outstripped the previous decade. And at the center of it all is agentic AI — software that doesn't wait for a human to click a button. It reasons, acts, and loops back continuously, at machine speed.

That changes everything for networks. Our research shows a single agentic task generates 450% more traffic than a human doing the same work. Without agentic AI, enterprise WAN traffic was expected to grow 2.5 times over the next decade. With it, that number jumps to 9 times — and we think that might be conservative.

Cisco's answer is Cloud Control, a unified platform that brings compute, networking, security, observability, and collaboration into one login, one shared view. It's designed to work with what you already have, not replace it. Inside, there's an Agent Builder for creating custom AI agents connected to AWS, Google, Microsoft, and ServiceNow, plus an App Builder that turns natural-language prompts into applications using OpenAI Codex.

On the security side, Cisco is tackling the new threat landscape head-on. The company joined Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI's Daybreak as a founding partner, using advanced AI vulnerability discovery tools to find and fix flaws before attackers do. Live Protect, now available in N9000 series switches, acts as a digital immune system — shielding vulnerabilities without patches or reboots.

Cloud Control is available now in the U.S., with global rollout later this year. Cisco's bet is simple: the network isn't just part of the AI infrastructure — it is the AI infrastructure.