Cisco AI Summit | Opening Remarks from Chuck Robbins, Chair & CEO, Cisco

This is our second annual AI summit and uh I think the lineup we have this year is incredible and last year's event was a great event but today we're bringing a special group of people together to

really talk about the entire AI ecosystem AI visionaries and I also want to just recognize the people that are watching this online in addition to who's in the room with us today. Uh we

appreciate you spending time with us and hopefully you really enjoy the event. Uh

just so you know, this is all thought leadership and all discussions about what's going on, all things AI. There's

no product announcements, just candid conversations, no sales pitches, right G2?

>> No sales.

>> All right, good. And uh but I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in business and society and where things are are happening with AI. I think that last year was a big turning point as we all know and for all the enterprise

customers who are here this week. We all

believe 2026 is going to be a turning point for AI and we believe that this will be the year of Agentic applications and we believe that all of us know that

the impact on what we do every day is going to change significantly and whether we're talking to our enterprise customers or governments around the world we know we have to embrace this.

Many of us believe it's the biggest transition that we've ever seen and I'm old. I've been through a lot of them and

old. I've been through a lot of them and uh and this I do believe will be more revolutionary and it's moving faster obviously than anything that we've ever seen. There are lots of questions and

seen. There are lots of questions and discussions about what does it mean to your your enterprise infrastructure?

What does it mean to your security posture? What does it mean to

posture? What does it mean to application development cycles? All

those things are really important and all of us in this room know that those of us who embrace AI will ultimately be the winners. And so that's what this is

the winners. And so that's what this is all about today. And we hope that we can be a bit a little bit uh a little part of helping you actually take advantage of what's going on in this industry right now.

One other topic I just want to touch on quickly is trust. Uh you'll hear G2 talk about the the fact that one of the deficits that we have in deploying AI.

One thing that bothers us is trust.

Whether it's trust in what's going to happen to my data, trust in the models, trust in your infrastructure, trust in the agents, trust in the partners that you're working with. This is a very big

deal and it was it was front and center in Davos. I know some of you in this

in Davos. I know some of you in this room were in Davos. There were a lot of discussions about trust for lots of reasons, but uh particularly as it relates to AI, whether it's geopolitical

dynamics, sovereign dynamics, it's a big topic that uh that we'll also cover a bit today, but it's a conversation that we'll want to continue as we leave here.

And I'm proud of the trust that we have had over the years with our customers and with governments around the world.

and we continue to plan to operate in a way that makes you feel good about working with us and other partners that we all bring to the table to actually make this a reality. We all know that

it's moving fast and none of us can do it alone. Therefore, trust is really

it alone. Therefore, trust is really imperative.

We've been working a lot on the infrastructure and how your infrastructure will have to change to adapt to this. We know that as you deploy agents, your traffic flows are going to change. The latency

requirements are going to change. Your

security architecture is going to have to change. And we have been working a

to change. And we have been working a great deal whether it's with the hyperscalers on building out infrastructure, whether it's sovereign cloud providers. We're really seeing the

cloud providers. We're really seeing the enterprise start to pick up. We're doing

this through partnerships with NVIDIA, AMD, OpenAI, Anthropic, others, as well as Humane, G42, and other partners around the world where we're learning a

lot about how this is being done, and we hope to be able to bring that to you as we move forward and bring not only the trust, but also the understanding of how AI is being deployed all around the world.