There’s one thing guaranteed from a CEO keynote at Cisco Live, dating back to the John Chambers days. At some point, in front of thousands of customers and partners, the chief executive will declare that it is either the most exciting time ever to be part of the technology industry or that the network is more important than ever as a result of the day’s trend or transition.

The streak lived on at this year’s Cisco Live, held in San Diego. However, current Chief Executive Chuck Robbins said there’s one key difference. “This year, we mean it.”

Joking aside, Robbins said the current shift from generative AI to generative AI took him back to Cisco’s late ‘90s salad days of building out the Internet.

“That was incredible, but this is going to be faster, more complicated, and more impactful than it was back then,” he said.

Robbins touched on Cisco’s own adventures in exploring chatbots, and how the company’s thinking has rapidly evolved, over just a few months, from playing with the idea of chatbots, to using AI to manage the “workforce, both humand chatbots,” and of course, the network infrastructure and security ramifications of that change.

He said the shift to AI “agents” making and managing decisions for the business is putting networking and other IT professionals in a unique place because the concept has the full attention of customers’ CEOs.

“They want to move fast,” he said. “They’re worried about safety and security, but they’re just as worried about their competitors moving faster and getting a competitive advantage. The good news is that you’re at the heart of making that happen. And the bad news is that you’re at the heart of making that happen.”

He mused that a few short years ago, as public cloud dominated the IT infrastructure discussion, people publicly mused, “What if no customer ever buys another Ethernet port?” To paraphrase both Robbins and Mark Twain, rumours of the network’s demise may have been greatly exaggerated.

“Private data centers are back, Robbins declared. “Most of you are looking at a balanced hybrid approach and thinking through all of it. There’s a great value in the cloud, but you’re also going to have smaller instances and smaller models running at the edge. You’re going to have to work hard at building out that private infrastructure to go with the public infrastructure.”

Robbins suggested that Cisco was uniquely positioned to lead the infrastructure charge because of its deep expertise in both networking and security. The two significant challenges are building out the infrastructure and ensuring everything is secure from both internal threats and protected against AI going in directions customers don’t want it to.

“None of our networking friends have security, and none of our security friends have networking,” Robbins noted. 

There’s a third leg to that stool, too. It might not get as much attention as networking and security, but Robbins urged customers not to underestimate the importance of programmable silicon. By developing its own logic hardware, Cisco contends that it will be able to respond more quickly to changing network requirements as agents proliferate, as it can simply write new logic to existing hardware.

Robbins closed his presentation by outlining Cisco’s current big three goals: helping customers build AI-ready data centers, “future-proof their workplaces”, and do it all with an underlying layer of digital resilience.

“This is all changing so quickly, between technology transitions and the global geopolitical situation,” he said. “You have to have security, you have to build with integrity, and you have to build with consideration for humanity. We want to partner with you to bring the vision to life in a way you feel good about.”

In the end, he said, Cisco’s advantage is that it can do both networking and security, and that it is increasingly bringing those two closer together, as witnessed by the new president, Jeetu Patel, taking the approach of having a single product organization.

“We’re the only company that can bring that all together with technology we own,” Robbins said.