SAN DIEGO — AI has the technology industry “moving at a pace as an industry, as a group, and as partners, that we haven’t moved in a very long time,” Cisco CEO Chuk Robbins told the company’s partners in his show-opening keynote at the company’s Partner Summit here.
“We have incredible opportunities with AI, and a great number of unknowns with AI,” Robbins told partners. “We need to stick together, be transparent, and offer your feedback, good and bad, so we can collectively go after this opportunity together.”
He paused before adding a friendly barb at the always-outspoken partner community.
“And you usually don’t have much of a problem being candid and transparent.”
Robbins’ keynote centered around the idea of trust — both between Cisco and its partners as it goes through the transition to its new Cisco 360 partner program, and on behalf of customers in nascent technology and the partners providing it.
“They won’t use it if they can’t trust it,” Robbins said of AI, pointing to the need for both built-in and intentional security, and data sovereignty to make sure valuable corporate data stays proprietary and locked down. “AI begins with trust, both in partnerships, in who you work with, as well as in the technology.”
And that’s overwhelming customers, due to the pace of change, ongoing evolution, and often esoteric nature of AI as a technology.
“We all think we’re reasonably good technology people, and we’re struggling to keep up,” he admitted. “But if we’re struggling with it, think about how our customers are struggling.”
But the chief executive has no doubt of his company’s role in the transition, noting in a post-keynote session with press and analysts that while Cisco may have struggled through the cloud transition of the last decade, it is in a good position for this decade’s sea change.
“There is no AI without the network,” Robbins said, echoing the decades-old talking point of Cisco execs that the current market trend makes the network more relevant than ever. But there’s a twist, Robbins said.
“Unlike past transitions, it’s not just the network. It’s a trusted, secure network,” Robbins told partners, telling them that trust extends not just to the technology, but to them in their role as advisors and implementors. “Our customers want partners they can trust. They need to trust technology they can’t see, that’s changing so fast they can’t understand.”
He repeated another favorite bit of Cisco advice, that all of the company’s competitors are players in networking, or in security, but not in both.
“We can do this together in ways no one else can,” Robbins said. “Network and security together, nobody else is doing it. End-to-end infrastructure, the network for agentic AI apps, and the data fabric with Splunk.”
And there’s one more differentiator the chief executive sees for his company, one that played well with the audience.
“Nobody else has you,” he said.
He pointed partners to a series of top opportunities for the company. Because it’s 2025, AI was first and foremost on that list. It’s hard for it not to be, when Robbins is quoting IDC that figured that estimate a $1.3 trillion (U.S.) opportunity over the next five years.
But there are other big-dollar opportunities. Robbins described campus and branch refresh as a $40 billion opportunity that will drive new managed service opportunities for partners, and talked up the opportunity around security, particularly around agentic AI, where only 31 percent of customers feel they’re ready for prime time.
He said he and customers need partners to ramp up their premium services, noting that partners represented 90 percent of Cisco’s managed services portfolio. And he urged partners to learn more about its Splunk acquisition, now integrated into both Cisco’s price book and partner programs, and build a practice around the data platform and security management search software.
“It is highly profitable and there’s a lot of demand,” he said of Splunk. “You will not regret it.”
