Customers are very focused on modernizing their network infrastructure in the enterprise in preparation for inferencing and AI workloads, Robbins said. “These things are always multi-year efforts,” and this is only the beginning, Robbins said.
The AI opportunity
“As we look at the AI opportunity, we see customer use cases growing across training, inferencing, and connectivity, with secure networking increasingly critical as workloads move from the data center to end users, devices, and agents at the edge,” Robbins said. “Agents are transforming network traffic from predictable bursts to persistent high-intensity loads, with agentic AI queries generating up to 25 times more network traffic than chatbots.”
“Instead of pulling data to and from the data center, AI workloads require models and infrastructure to be closer to where data is created and decisions are made, particularly in industries such as retail, healthcare, and manufacturing.”
Robbins pointed to last week’s introduction of Cisco Unified Edge, a converged platform that integrates networking, compute and storage to help enterprise customers more efficiently handle data from AI and other workloads at the edge. “Unified Edge enables real-time inferencing for agentic and physical AI workloads, so enterprises can confidently deploy and manage AI at scale,” Robbins said.
On the hyperscaler front, “we see a lot of solid pipeline throughout the rest of the year. The use cases, we see it expanding,” Robbins said. “Obviously, we’ve been selling networking infrastructure under the training models. We’ve been selling scale-out. We launched the P200-based router that will begin to address some of the scale-across opportunities.”
Cisco has also seen great success with its pluggable optics, Robbins said. “All of the hyperscalers now are officially customers of our pluggable optics, so we feel like that’s a great opportunity. They not only plug into our products, but they can be used with other companies’ products, with our competitors or white boxes. That’s been good. We’ve also begun to see inferencing use cases.”
