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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Behind-the-scenes providers such as Cisco keep the cloud and internet alive.
- The 40-year-old company now positions itself as an AI infrastructure vendor.
- The challenge: proactively supporting millions, if not billions of devices worldwide.
It’s the nature of the market beast — think about all the formerly booming tech providers that have disappeared over the years, either by acquisition or collapse: Digital Equipment Corporation, Wang, Compaq, just to name a few.
Yet, there are some that have evolved and adapted quite aggressively through the decades — Microsoft from its personal computer roots to Azure and Copilot; Google from simple search engine to Google AI; Amazon from online bookseller to Amazon Web Services, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon SageMaker; and Adobe from PostScript and PDFs to Firefly.
Also: Cisco rolls out AI agents to automate network tasks at ‘machine speed’ – with IT still in control
I feel as though some of the backbone companies we rely on to keep the internet and cloud running — Cisco and IBM come to mind — have taken a backseat, at least in terms of attention, to all the razzle-dazzle of the AI age. After all, AI would be nothing more than a disconnected, dysfunctional spreadsheet without the massive, sophisticated global infrastructure needed to support it.
So when I had the opportunity to talk to Cisco Systems recently, I was more than curious about how the 40-year-old networking hardware company — bellwether of the industry in the 1990s — has been reinventing itself in the AI age. Ultimately, it is purposing AI to help companies build their AI systems.
The company has positioned itself as an AI-driven infrastructure and services provider, especially when it comes to supporting the millions of hardware devices at customer sites across the globe, said Liz Centoni, executive vice president and chief customer experience officer at Cisco.
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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Centoni, who has been with Cisco for 20 years, and learned about Cisco’s journey from network hardware provider to AI systems provider. (I also spoke with Centoni about the emerging role of customer experience officers.)
Cisco deserves more respect
Apparently, things are going very, very well. “Cisco Systems deserves more respect in AI, and its quarterly results prove it,” wrote CNBC’s Jeff Marks in a recent article. The company’s most recent quarterly earnings report shows about $14.7 billion in revenue, an 8% jump over last year’s quarter. During fiscal year 2025, the company saw more than $2 billion in orders for its AI infrastructure systems, the Wall Street Journal reports, well over its initial $1 billion goal.
Such transformation starts from the inside out. Internally, Cisco has embraced an AI-first approach, said Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer for Cisco, in an interview with CXOTalk. This includes transforming “the way that we build product, the way that our products get used by customers, the way that we actually get jobs done within the company,” AI is now behind the company’s responses to support tickets, in reducing overhead costs, accelerating sales meetings, and handling legal and accounting processes involved with sales. Because of AI, Cisco “is an entirely different company than what it used to be three years ago,” Patel said.
Also: How Cisco plans to stop rogue AI agent attacks inside your network
At the core of any and all AI transformations is the need to up the customer experience — AI needs to be used as a tool to better understand what customers want, and be able to fix any problems quickly, or even before they happen.
While not a direct Cisco customer myself, I admit I have been quite impressed lately with my internet and stream providers’ responsiveness (I use both Verizon and Comcast) to issues — glitches seem to self-heal quickly, and phone calls to support start off with automated remote pings to my equipment to rectify problems. (I hope I didn’t just jinx myself!)
Centoni said that such AI-driven service, the ability to quickly address problems without much fuss, is at the core of Cisco’s service philosophy.
‘We’re an AI infrastructure company’
“We started out as a networking company, and we’ve grown into security, helping customers change their architectures to modernize their infrastructure,” she said. “Now, we’re helping customers with AI infrastructure. We’re an AI infrastructure company. We help them build the stack on which to run AI, along with training and inference.”
While it may seem that the world is advancing en masse into AI, Centoni observed that many of Cisco’s customers are just starting to use AI in a comprehensive way. Then, there are some who are “building the large language models and running AI workloads. We help them with the services they can offer to their customers, the use cases, and finding what they want to solve with AI.”
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AI — and AI agents — are helping quickly unravel configuration and network issues, as well as help customers with expansion plans, she continued. “This means that they can reduce the amount of manpower time involved. They add a new branch to their campus, for example, but do it with higher confidence and lower risk.” For the future, the company is exploring agentic AI that can answer customers’ questions. “Even if the models not completely trained, they can ask it questions like ‘where does this VM sit?'”
An example of AI in action is Cisco’s approach to firewall security, which incorporates natural language processing inputs from administrators to address issues, making it faster and easier to address potential security threats. Centoni noted: “How do we make it simple? Because if you don’t make it simple, your teams will find a way to go around it, and security is not the space you want them to go around it.”
40 years’ worth of customer networking data
The goal is to train models to “help us understand that customer, in a much deeper way, than any human can,” Centoni said. Cisco has 40 years’ worth of customer networking data within its knowledgebase. “It’s looking at the entire account history. It’s looking at all of their telemetry and gives you alerts before it even hits the customer. And it can provide actions, and recommendations. It goes beyond the break/fix.”
Also: Here’s why network infrastructure is vital to maximizing your company’s AI adoption
The company’s goal is to employ AI to “engage with customers in a bigger way,” she said. “And to start to think about things we could solve for our customers, to get more proactive, and address everything in real time.”
Cisco is an example of a backbone company that, while not at the forefront of the AI excitement, is keeping calm and carrying on, thank you. The lesson for everyone — career professional, entrepreneur, and Fortune 500 executive — is in the power to adapt, and ensure those adaptations are all about the customer.
