Cisco rolls out agentic AI platform to manage and secure critical infrastructure

Cisco on Tuesday launched a new agentic AI platform called Cisco Cloud Control, positioning it as a unified command centre for managing and defending critical IT infrastructure at machine speed. The company said the platform is designed for humans and AI agents to work together across networking, security, observability, collaboration and compute.

Unified control plane

Cisco said Cloud Control will provide a single login and a single view of the enterprise estate, bringing data from multiple domains into one operating environment. It also allows customers to build applications and agents using natural language, while connecting with a broad ecosystem that includes AWS, Microsoft, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack and Google Cloud.

Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco, said AI agents are changing the speed and scale at which infrastructure must be managed. “AI agents reason and act continuously at software speed, and that changes everything about how we scale, manage, and defend our critical infrastructure,” he said. “Cisco Cloud Control is a command center for agentic AI: a platform where your team and your AI agents work together, in the same environment, with the same information, and with humans in control.”

Security at machine speed

Cisco also announced a series of security updates aimed at closing the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, which the company said has shrunk from weeks to minutes in the AI era. Among them is an expanded version of Live Protect, which shields more Cisco products from newly discovered vulnerabilities at runtime, without reboots, upgrades or downtime.

The company said its new security features are intended to help organizations defend critical systems while keeping human operators in control. Cisco also expanded capabilities around AI Defense, zero trust for agents and the Agentic SOC.

Quantum-ready push

Cisco said it is also preparing customers for long-term security risks with new quantum-ready assessments and a broader quantum-safe communications roadmap. The assessments are meant to identify assets most exposed to so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks.

The company said newly introduced campus, branch and data center routers, switches and firewall series will launch with quantum-safe secure boot, and that quantum-safe communications capabilities will be enabled across most of its core portfolio by December 2026.

Cisco said Cloud Control is entering controlled availability in the US now, with global availability to follow. The company framed the launch as part of its broader push to build an “agentic enterprise,” where AI agents and human operators share the same context, workflows and oversight.

Nasdaq-listed Cisco said the platform will be supported by Cisco Services and Cisco IQ tools aimed at building longer-term infrastructure resilience.