Cisco Advances AI Infrastructure, Security, and Management

Author: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst

What's the news?

At its annual Cisco Live conference, held June 2-4, 2026, Cisco made several announcements to advance its AI capabilities across product lines, including collaboration. With these announcements, Cisco aims to reinforce its AI positioning, which focuses on:

• Providing AI-ready data centers
• Enabling future-proofed workplaces
• Securing global connectivity
• Ensuring digital resilience

A primary announcement is the introduction of Cisco Cloud Control, a unified AgenticOps platform for management and security across all of Cisco networking and collaboration offerings. Cloud Control, currently in limited release in North America, leverages AI to detect and respond to network and security events, ideally before business impact. Cloud Control provides several individual agentic AI capabilities for network configuration management user experience assurance, root cause analysis, and tools to emulate networks for pre-deployment testing. Cloud Control includes the formerly separate AI Canvas, announced a year ago for Cisco switches and routers and now available. AI Canvas uses AI to enable sophisticated troubleshooting and management across multiple domains.

Additional announcements include new Cisco-developed AI processors, new routers and switches, multicloud fabric for network isolation and zero-trust security with ThousandEyes-provided security visibility, expansion of Live Protect availability for protecting network devices against zero-day threats without requiring patching, and new tools to help organizations protect against post-quantum computing threats.

Specific to workplace collaboration, announcements include the new Cisco Board Pro G3 collaboration device for meeting rooms and a new meeting prep agent for Webex meetings. The agent allows participants to use both Webex and external data sources to prepare agendas and background information before meetings. The Board Pro G3, available in 55”, 75”, or multi-screen versions, is a Microsoft Teams-certified MDEP touch-screen platform with integrated camera and multiple deployment options. It includes a NVIDIA AI chipset to enable on-device processing of AI capabilities such as note-taking and active-speaker focus.