The Biggest Announcements From Cisco Live 2026
By Alexis Bertholf, Global Technical Evangelist
Cisco Live 2026 showed where networking is headed next. Explore the top announcements shaping cloud, AI, security, and more.
Cisco Live 2026 just wrapped up in Las Vegas, and if there was one message that came through loud and clear, it was this: Infrastructure is becoming more autonomous.
Across networking, security, cloud, and AI, Cisco’s announcements pointed toward a future where operations become increasingly automated, security becomes deeply integrated into infrastructure, and AI plays a much larger role in how environments are managed.
I got to attend Cisco Live 2026 with the Megaport team, and while there were plenty of announcements throughout the week, four major themes stood out to me.
Cloud Control and AgenticOps: Cisco’s vision for AI-driven operations
This was probably the biggest announcement of the event.
Cisco introduced Cloud Control, a new operational platform designed to bring networking, security, observability, and infrastructure operations together under a single control plane.
Alongside it came AgenticOps, Cisco’s vision for how AI agents will help manage infrastructure in the future. The idea is relatively simple: Instead of engineers manually jumping between dozens of dashboards and tools, AI agents can investigate issues, correlate events, identify root causes, recommend actions, and potentially automate remediation.
Whether you’re enthusiastic about AI or cautiously skeptical, it’s hard to ignore where the industry is heading. Over the last year, we’ve watched AI move from being a productivity tool to an operational tool. Cisco is clearly betting that AI agents will become part of day-to-day infrastructure management.
What’s interesting here isn’t necessarily the technology itself, but what it says about the future role of engineers.
I don’t think infrastructure teams are becoming less important – but I do think they’re becoming more strategic. Tomorrow’s engineer will probably spend less time manually managing individual devices and more time defining intent, policies, and outcomes across entire environments.
AI infrastructure has become the main event
At last year’s Cisco Live, every conference conversation seemed to revolve around AI models. This year, the conversation felt very different. Now, the focus has moved to the infrastructure required to run AI at scale.
Cisco spent a significant amount of time discussing:
- AI-ready data centers
- high-performance Ethernet fabrics
- GPU connectivity
- workload segmentation
- large-scale AI operations.
This trend matches up with what I keep seeing across the industry. I’ve said before that the AI race is going to be won with infrastructure – and the more events I attend, the more convinced I become.
Every AI workload ultimately depends on three foundational components: compute, network, and storage. Without those building blocks, none of the models matter.
That’s also why we’re seeing companies across the ecosystem expand their focus beyond individual technology domains and toward complete AI infrastructure stacks. For network engineers specifically, this matters because AI is changing traffic patterns inside data centers.
East-west traffic continues to grow. GPU clusters require massive bandwidth. Latency becomes increasingly important. And perhaps most notably, Ethernet keeps gaining momentum as the networking fabric of choice for AI environments.
The conversation has gone beyond connecting users to applications. More and more, it’s now about connecting GPUs to GPUs.
Security is becoming part of the network
Security was another major theme throughout Cisco Live 2026.
What stood out most wasn’t any single announcement, but the broader direction, especially when it comes to SASE and infrastructure protection.
One announcement that caught my attention was Cisco Live Protect, which aims to help customers apply protections against known vulnerabilities without immediately requiring emergency patching windows or disruptive upgrades.
Cisco also continued expanding its security portfolio across Secure Access, identity, AI traffic visibility, and zero-trust architectures.
The practical benefit is obvious. Security teams are under constant pressure to respond quickly to cybersecurity issues while minimizing operational disruption, so solutions that help bridge that gap are always received well.
More broadly, Cisco’s messaging reinforced something I’ve been seeing across the industry for a while now: security can no longer sit beside the network. It has to become part of the network.
As environments become more distributed and AI adoption accelerates, infrastructure and security teams are becoming more interconnected. The organizations that treat them as separate disciplines may find themselves at a disadvantage sooner than they realize.
Automation is connecting everything
If there was one theme that tied nearly every announcement together, it was automation.
Cloud Control. AgenticOps. AI infrastructure. Security operations. Observability. All of it pointed toward the same goal: reducing operational complexity.
Modern environments have become incredibly difficult to manage. Organizations are dealing with multicloud architectures, distributed applications, growing security requirements, and now AI workloads layered on top of everything else. The traditional approach of manually managing every component simply doesn’t scale.
Cisco’s strategy appears focused on helping organizations move from device-centric operations toward outcome-driven operations – intent, automation, and outcomes. That’s a trend I expect we’ll continue seeing across the industry.
The most successful teams won’t necessarily be the ones managing the most technology – they’ll be the ones managing complexity most effectively.
My biggest takeaway from Cisco Live 2026
Walking away from Cisco Live 2026, I kept coming back to three observations:
- Infrastructure is becoming more autonomous.
- Security is becoming more integrated.
- More than ever, the network is the foundation that connects everything together.
For years, networking was often viewed as the plumbing behind the scenes. Today, it’s becoming one of the most strategic layers of the modern technology stack. AI, cloud, security, and automation all depend on it.
And based on what I saw at Cisco Live 2026, that trend is only accelerating.
If you attended Cisco Live 2026, what announcement or trend stood out most to you? Connect with me on LinkedIn – I’d love to hear your thoughts!
