On June 8-12th, Cisco Live! 2025 held their annual conference in San Diego. This year wasn’t just another tech conference, it was a festival of declaration of the AI Era, and how Cisco is empowering businesses to seize its full potential. Forget complexity and security headaches, they are delivering intelligent, agile, and robust infrastructure needed to thrive in an AI driven world. Faith Group sent three members of our IT staff, Thomas Surber, Bill Cozzens, and Hassan Chalabi with the mission to explore and engage with the next generation technology and innovation that is shaping this new AI Era.
Get ready to Rumble! Agentic AI and the Network of Tomorrow
During the opening keynote session, given by Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, one quote stood out to our staff. “And the same way the critical infrastructure that we built for the internet, the critical infrastructure that we collectively built that powers the infrastructure in your environment, we’re going to do the same thing for agentic AI.”
The future isn’t just about AI answering chatbot questions. It’s about AI agents autonomously performing real tasks and jobs – the “agentic era of AI” is here! Cisco is building the foundation for this revolution with a secure network architecture purpose-built for AI. Imagine your network seamlessly handling explosive traffic, lightning-fast speeds, and massive data demands, all while delivering unmatched operational simplicity. We’re talking about unified management, next-gen devices, and security woven into the very fabric of your infrastructure.
Cloud Control to Major Tom! Next-Gen Security for the AI Era
AI is transforming industries, driving an urgent demand for the next level of security. Cisco Live! showcased how security is embedded deeper than ever before. Picture this:
- Hybrid Mesh Firewall: A distributed security fabric that delivers zero-trust segmentation, shields your AI applications, and offers advanced threat defense across every environment.
- Universal ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access): Secure, identity-driven access for every user and device, unifying policy management and extending zero trust even to unmanaged devices.
- Cisco AI Defense & Hypershield: Comprehensive visibility, validation, and real-time protection for your entire enterprise AI workflow, ensuring your AI initiatives are both powerful and protected with the integration of Splunk.
New firewalls and a new feature called Firewall Mesh extend this protection even further, forming an AI-native distributed security architecture. This security fabric includes firewalls (physical, virtual, and cloud), agents (traditional and Kubernetes workloads), and smart switches that fuse security directly into the network infrastructure.
Splunk It Like It’s Hot: The Convergence of Data and Security
Cisco has reinforced Splunk’s position as the central data platform and analytics engine at the heart of its converged strategy across networking, security, and observability. With the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-driven operations and digital resilience, Splunk is no longer just a standalone analytics tool, but is now deeply integrated into Cisco’s core strategy. Positioned as the central nervous system for data collection and analysis, Splunk empowers Cisco’s platforms with advanced capabilities in security, observability, and AI-driven automation in the increasingly complex and AI-dependent environment.
AI Heard It Through the Grapevine: Collaboration Gets Smarter
Cisco’s market-leading collaboration offerings are also evolving rapidly through AI. From the integration of AI-driven customer experiences with Webex contact center, to the development of new Codecs that allow better transmission of speech across unstable media, Cisco has rolled out a number of new AI capabilities.
Call AI Maybe: Maximizing Agent Value and Capability
Cisco Webex Contact Center now embraces the use of AI interview strategies to maximize agent engagement by offloading much of the most basic contact center interview flows to automated chatbots, who are enabled to provide good informational answers, have also to qualify questions before engaging agents. These bots use natural language speech-to-text to both document interactions, as well as manage upstream inquiries with text-based systems.
Additionally, Webex Contact Center focuses on the agent as a person. As we raise the value of human agent interaction, we also look at helping them be effective as a person. Agent burnout detection helps to keep human agents engaged, and helps them focus not only on managing effective conversations that are beyond the scope of AI, but also helps them track their engagement screen time and effort levels, to keep them engaged and avoid burnout.
Clear as AI’ll Ever Be: Cisco’s Webex AI Codec
The Cisco Webex AI Codec revolutionizes the transmission of human speech over poor and lossy connections. This is especially valuable for maintaining conversation quality in emergency, critical, and high stakes situations, where packet loss, delay, and jitter are very destructive to the transmission of real time media. Providing the capability to restore and maintain speech quality during these times is a significant breakthrough.
The Cisco Webex AI Codec significantly outperforms traditional speech codecs during times of reduced network capability. It is bundled for free with the Cisco Webex App, now built-in to Cisco’s new Video Endpoint line of products, and will soon be released to function with Cisco hardware collaboration endpoints.
Get up, come on, get down with the AI: Cisco Catalyst Smart Switch C9610R
With 18RU, this massive unit is the Future-Ready Core for the AI Era Campus, elevating the Enterprise Network with unprecedented performance, security, and AI-driven automation. This year’s conference highlighted a pivotal shift in networking, driven by the demands of AI workloads and the need for pervasive digital resilience. The Cisco Catalyst 9610R Smart Switch emerged as a cornerstone of this vision, designed to be the robust and intelligent core of next-generation campus networks.
Closing Time: Final Takeaway from Cisco Live!
Cisco Live! 2025 was all about empowering the industry to confidently navigate and lead in the AI era. Delivering the secure, simplified, and high-performing network infrastructure needed to drive innovation and achieve digital transformation goals. By attending, our staff witnessed firsthand the advancements of what is to come for our next generation, enabling them to better identify opportunities to align with potential client use-cases. Please reach out to any of our staff to learn more about the AI era, or how we can partner on a proof-of-concept in our Faith Group/Saefix Innovation Lab.
Thomas Surber, CCIE, CISSP
Manager of Network & ITS Design
thomas.surber@faithgroupllc.com
Bill Cozzens
Sr. Design Consultant
bill.cozzens@faithgroupllc.com
Hassan Chalabi, CCNP, CCNAx3, CCDA
Sr. Network Designer
hassan.chalabi@faithgroupllc.com