# Cisco Preps For A World Of AI Agent Coworkers, Frontier Model Threats > Source: > Published: 2026-06-03 00:10:37+00:00 # Cisco Preps For A World Of AI Agent Coworkers, Frontier Model Threats Last month, we did a deep dive into [Cisco Systems’ third quarter fiscal 2026 numbers](https://www.nextplatform.com/connect/2026/05/18/cisco-wins-over-ai-customers-with-merchant-silicon-and-optics/5242200) to get a gauge on what the AI market looks like when you strip away what the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model makers are spending for their AI datacenter buildouts and instead focus on the up-and-coming AI users – think enterprises, neoclouds, and sovereigns – and the traditional hardware vendors that will supply them. Those include system builders like Dell – and we heard a lot about [what the company is doing with AI](https://www.nextplatform.com/compute/2026/05/19/dell-bulks-up-hardware-as-ai-infrastructure-shifts-to-on-premises/5242811) last month during the Dell Technologies World 2026 show – and later this month, HPE will weigh in at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas. This week it’s Cisco at [Cisco Live 2026](https://www.ciscolive.com/), also in Vegas. Cisco made a [strong push into the AI field](https://www.nextplatform.com/compute/2025/06/12/ciscos-hyperscale-and-cloud-ai-push-will-give-it-enterprise-clout/100798) at last year’s event, and this year they further outlined the latest efforts to build out its AI infrastructure stack for enterprises, particularly in this still emerging world of agentic AI – and now frontier AI models – and the challenges they present. Those challenges touch on all aspects of IT, from computing and networking to security and data. For example, AI agents create a tremendous amount of traffic. In its recent report, *AI Impact on Wide Area Networks*, Cisco found that agents generated [450 percent more traffic per task](https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/artificial-intelligence/mass-scale-infrastructure/ai-network-traffic-report.pdf) than with traditional tools. In the realm of data security, AI and automation drastically reduced the average breakout time – the amount of time between an initial network compromise and the moment attackers begin moving laterally through the network [– to 29 minutes](https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/global-threat-report/). And the introduction of [frontier AI models](https://www.nextplatform.com/ai/2026/04/27/the-genai-battle-shifts-from-frontier-models-to-agentic-platforms/5218897) like Anthropic’s much-talked-about Claude Mythos Preview could drive that down even more. The broad reach AI has throughout an enterprise has Cisco, like its competitors, putting pieces in place to ensure its technologies reach every area, and that was on display during the first day of Cisco Live. With each announcement, executives wanted to show a fully integrated stack of Cisco networking, networking, and security for datacenters and cloud environments that can draw in tools from tech partners, drive faster deployment and implementation through validated designs and pre-configured designs, and include security capabilities that are increasingly important as AI becomes embedded in infrastructure and agents take on business operations. ### A ‘Very Unique Advantage’ The vendor has been building out its infrastructure, software, services, and AI capabilities for several years, which DJ Sampath, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s AI Software and Platform Group, said gives the company a “very unique advantage” over competitors. “We [manufacture our own silicon](https://www.nextplatform.com/connect/2025/07/07/silicon-one-many-cisco-chips-with-one-architecture-chasing-many-ai-workloads/1661717) and that gives us the ability to start to reimagine a co-designed full stack that goes all the way from silicon to the network to the security being fused into that network in a way that nobody else can then combining that with the ability to leverage our data platform that brings all of these telemetry together and finally making it incredibly simple to operate and effective across these different domains using what we call AgenticOps,” Sampath told journalists and analysts. A key to what Cisco wants to do lies in the understanding that as AI agents become more integrated into business operations, the operating model has to change and be simplified to create the conditions in which humans and agents can work together. “One of the big transformations that's happening is we're starting to see this evolution happen from chatbots to agents, and when we talk about agents, what we're starting to see is agents are sort of manifesting themselves as additional coworkers,” he said. “You're onboarding them, you're working with these agents and these agents are starting to become very intrinsically woven into how you're starting to think about your day-to-day work. It's no longer about humans clicking through dashboards, a multitude of dashboards, and trying to keep up with what the agents are doing. A true collaborative operating model starts when agents are doing the heavy lifting** **and humans are constantly staying in control of what matters.” Foundational to this is Cisco Cloud Control, its AgenticOps platform that includes a range of Cisco tools, including AI Assistant, a general AI interface that spans the vendor’s portfolio, such as Meraki, Webex, and Security Cloud Control, to streamline IT operations and security through natural language, as well as AI Canvas, a new workspace that both humans and agents use in real-time when investigating and solving issues together. Within Cloud Control is studio, which includes tools for customizing environments – Agent Builder for creating agents tailored to their workflows and with the ability to connect to more than 30 third party platforms and tool through connectors or Model Context Protocol (MCP), and App Builder for building and publishing apps and workflows for Cloud Control through natural-language prompts. It comes with OpenAI’s Codex coding platform built in. In addition, Cisco also unveiled the Cloud Control Marketplace, where third-party offerings – not only apps, but integrations or agents – that can be used within Cloud Control. In addition, apps and agents built by Cloud Control users also can be place into the marketplace. With agents autonomously running tasks – reaching deep into enterprise data and other parts of the infrastructure – frontier AI models that not only can detect and identity software vulnerabilities quickly but also rapidly generate exploits for them, security has become a key issue for operating AI infrastructure, according to Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s Infrastructure and Security Group. “When we look at the old model, we would harden our infrastructure, look for vulnerabilities, go through and plug all those holes, and then don't touch it for as long as possible,” Gillis said. “For a lot of customers, that ‘long as possible’ could be a year, 18 months, two years. With Mythos this creates a gap between when a vulnerability is discovered and exploited and when a patch is deployed, that gap is massive.” That’s the thinking behind Live Protect, which is designed to shield Cisco hardware from newly discovered security flaws, which promise to mount as frontier models turn up more new bugs at a faster rate. A month after Mythos’ announcement, Anthropic last month said the several dozen vendors and researchers who were part of Project Glasswing – the initiative created when the IT vendor limited the availability of Mythos to protect organizations against bad actors that might use it in their attacks – [uncovered more than 10,000 vulnerabilities](https://www.anthropic.com/research/glasswing-initial-update). Live Protect which is available in N9000 series switches and will expand into more Cisco systems in the coming months, isn’t meant to be a way to virtually patch vulnerable systems. The company described it as a digital immune system, with Gillis saying that “Live Protect is meant to be a finger in the dike that you use to plug the holes in between the maintenance windows and the patching cycle, which is also being changed due to Mythos.” Security also will come later this summer with Live Protect being put into smart switches, Cisco firewalls on routers, and post-quantum cryptography for SD-WAN devices.