Building the foundation for the agentic enterprise

Enterprise IT teams, the invisible force driving our modern work world, are struggling to manage environments that have become staggeringly complex, spanning thousands of devices, multiple security domains, and a patchwork of disconnected management tools.

This fragmentation runs across networking, security, infrastructure, observability, and collaboration systems and creates significant operational risk. When teams must act and defend infrastructure at machine speed and scale, yet manually stitch together context across siloed workflows, visibility suffers, response times slow, and the burden on already-stretched staff compounds, making it increasingly difficult to scale both human expertise and agentic automation.

These challenges are becoming more urgent as enterprises increasingly adopt AI and seek to gain the value of agentic operations. For human operators and AI agents to work together effectively, they need more than access to the same environment; they need a shared operational foundation that gives access to the same context, the same signals, and the same system of action across domains.

That foundation ensures that AI is no longer constrained by the fragmentation that limits scale and innovation, said Munish Mehta, senior director of networking at AMD, in this interview during Cisco Live:

Cisco Cloud Control is that foundation. It’s a unified platform built to give both human operators and AI agents shared operational context across every IT domain. It consolidates identity, governance, and administration so that networking, security, and observability share a common management experience rather than separate consoles.

Cisco Cloud Control is built for an open ecosystem, extending to more than 50 platforms and tools such as AWS, Google Cloud, Linear, Microsoft and ServiceNow. New capabilities like App Builder, leveraging built-in agentic coding assistant OpenAI Codex, further expands what teams can create and manage over time. Designed to evolve with an organization’s operational maturity, Cisco Cloud Control becomes more valuable as teams adopt more of its capabilities, said DJ Sampath, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco AI Platform and Software, in this interview during Cisco Live:

Central to Cisco Cloud Control is an operating model called AgenticOps, which is built on the premise that AI agents and human operators are most effective when they work together in a shared workspace rather than in parallel silos. That collaboration environment is called AI Canvas, and it surfaces cross-domain telemetry, connects teams and brings agents into a shared view so that investigations, remediations, and approvals happen in one place rather than across a chain of handoffs.

For example, new agentic loop automation can identify root causes and propose actions, while human operators retain oversight and approval authority before anything is executed. Anurag Dhingra, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise connectivity and collaboration at Cisco, offered further context during this interview at Cisco Live:

As AI moves from experimentation to operational reality, the organizations that will capture the most value are those that invest in the foundational layer that makes coordinated, trustworthy automation possible. Cisco Cloud Control’s unified platform approach, AgenticOps framework, and open integration architecture give enterprise IT teams and AI agents the shared context they need to operate as genuine partners rather than disconnected actors working in adjacent silos.

And for CIOs navigating the growing complexity of their IT environments with finite resources, this unified foundation lays the groundwork for enabling current and future AI innovation. Unified operations reduces the overhead associated with managing fragmented systems, and ensures that security and networking teams are working from the same operational picture.

Taken together, Cisco Cloud Control allows organizations to move from isolated automation and AI efforts to repeatable, scalable AI-powered operations.

Cisco is continually innovating and collaborating with its partners to help customers seamlessly transform to agentic operations. Delve into all the action that was announced at Cisco Live 2026.