Cisco Cloud Control Advances Agentic Ops | Cisco Live 2026

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to our Techstrong TV coverage from Cisco Live. Wow, what a day it's been.

I hope you've had the chance to see some of the earlier interviews. Some really great information. tv or on our OTT app, on whatever screen you happen to watch your videos on.

My next guest is DJ Sampath. DJ reminded me that I actually interviewed him at RSA almost 10 years ago now. Nine years ago.

That's right. Something like that. That's right.

And it just goes to show you the six degrees of separation in the security cyber world. Yeah. DJ, welcome back.

It's great to have you on here. Hey, thank you so much for having me, Alan. Always fun to talk to you, and I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited. Yeah. So, what have you been doing since 2017?

Hey, listen. A lot's been going on, as you can imagine. I think one of the most interesting things that happened was I founded this company called Armorblox, as you know.

I was the founder and CEO of this company. And I sold that company to Cisco about three years ago. Okay.

The company that I had founded was working on using AI to be able to solve very interesting cybersecurity problems, starting out with business email compromise and applying GPT-like models to be able to understand how attackers are using techniques that are very interesting to be able to attack your inboxes. Now, when Cisco came knocking, it was a very compelling opportunity, and that was to be able to lead the AI software and platforms opportunity that was available inside of Cisco. And it sounded like this could be something three years ago, and when Jeetu Patel, who was the chief product officer and president, he made a compelling pitch, a vision that basically laid out where we would be in a few years.

" And to me, that was extremely interesting and intriguing, and I said, "You know what? " And so my entire team came into Cisco, and since then, we've been doing things which have been game changing when we think about what we've managed to accomplish. So right now, I'm the SVP and GM for AI Software and Platforms.

I report to Jeetu Patel. And as part of one of the interesting things that we did at Cisco Live, it's been a very interesting progression of things that we've done, and it was a combination of some of the work that my team and I have been working on. But before I go there, I want to lay this out to you in terms of what has happened in the past about 18 months.

Right? We saw the momentum that was happening with respect to AI. Now, it's very obvious when you look back, and right after- Hindsight's always 20/20 Hindsight's always 20/20, right?

When you think about what happened as soon as ChatGPT came out, we all could touch and feel AI. Right? We could understand that, hey, this is what AI means at this point in time.

It's not a concept. It's not something just the machine learning engineers can understand. We all could understand it, right?

And so what happens instead is this massive acceleration of people starting to apply AI to a lot of different things. And so we sort of saw this around the bend, and we thought, hang on, AI safety and AI security is going to be very important as we start to think about this. As a security guy by training, you're always thinking about security from one lens or the other.

And so we said, at Cisco, we have the ability to sort of protect the use of AI, secure the use of AI. So we announced this product called AI Defense around March of last year. Okay.

We got it into the hands of our customers. And then we said, "Listen, now that we have some basic protections, we get basic guardrails in place," we needed to drive adoption even further. " While Cisco was building the core fundamental critical components of the infrastructure, which is basically the silicon to the network, to being able to systematically build systems that connect this entire stack.

Combine that with our acquisition of Splunk and our entire security assets. Cisco is sort of like, you might have heard Jeetu say this earlier, Cisco is a full stack company. Yes.

Full stack AI company. What was really interesting was to simplify how we think about managing all of these things. Yeah.

Right? And so we announced that we're starting to work on something called AI Canvas. Yeah.

And since then, we've been working very closely with a large number of customers to be able to understand exactly how can we reimagine how they do their operations. And what you heard this week, yesterday, and today is basically the culmination of that, where we said, "Hey, here's a platform offering," which is called Cisco Cloud Control. Cisco Cloud Control is focused on doing three things really well.

Right? First, it's basically simplifying your operations, but at the same time, you're not losing any sophistication that you normally get from some of the control planes that Cisco had already built. Right.

"The second thing was all about making sure that you are able to move at agent speed. Yes. Because the world's starting to fundamentally change how to move.

It's AI scale. It's AI scale. It's machine speed.

So we coined this term agent speed, which is like, hey, you're moving- Love it ... as fast as an agent is. I'm going to steal it.

Let me tell you up front. Oh. I'm going to start using it.

But- I allow you take it. I'll hand it to you Okay. Agent speed.

Agent speed, right? Yep. And then the third thing we said was, "Hey, we have to leverage an open ecosystem," because we don't have the hubris to imagine that every customer only has products from Cisco.

Right. Right? " And so to simplify these operations, with Cisco Cloud Control, we brought all of the dashboards of all of the products that we have into a single place.

We're talking about networking, security, collaboration, observability. They're all now available with a single login. Right.

When you think about this from an operator's perspective, and we've all been operators in our lives, where we know that, hey, if I have to go configure something, if I have to go to a dashboard here and a dashboard there- I have to go to four... Once I go to more than two, I'm done. You're done.

And they call it swivel chair. Yeah. You're swiveling back and forth and hope to be able to go from one computer to the other.

But the reality is that you really want to simplify by bringing all of these things. You don't have to remember passwords. It's all like a single login that gets you there.

" So we have the Cisco Data Fabric, which is powered by Splunk, providing us with a substrate that allows us to bring these things together, which means I now get the inventory of all of my routers, all of my switches, all of my firewalls, everything in a single place. I can see how they're connected using all of the topological things that they have. " So which means you are working along with your colleagues, and you're working alongside agents.

Agents are starting to behave like your teammates, right? Right. " And they come back, and they help you solve some of those things.

In fact, at the demo yesterday, one of the things that I did was I simply asked the question, "Hey, Jeetu. Jeetu's phone is not connecting to the network. " Right.

So that's really cool. I love it. I saw the demo yesterday, actually.

Great. I was very impressed. Oh, thank you.

Um. Yes, you're too kind. You know what?

But this is where the world is now, I think. Actually, I wrote an article this morning, it came out, that I think it was sort of like seeing an iceberg. You know what I mean?

We saw the tip above the water. Yeah. But the Cloud Control and what we've seen at Cisco Live this year has given us the whole mountain that's coming up from the sea, right?

And we are only seeing just this piece. Now we see it all, and what it really is, is it's an AI-empowered infrastructure management, right? This is the AI infrastructure operating system, if you will.

I love how you described it, and I think you're spot on. Yeah. Right.

And I think that's where one of the most important pieces over there is to be able to operate at agent speed when you think about this, right? And so this is where we said, hey, we coined another term earlier in the year. It was called agentic ops.

Uh-huh. Because if you're going to be operating- With agents, you got to do agentic ops. I agree with you ...

right? And so we call it agentic ops, and there are three things inside of agentic ops that's really important. For the agents to be able to do their jobs, you got to give them all the data across different domains.

So cross-domain telemetry was absolutely important, right? And that's one of the things that we went out and solved for. The second thing that's important is purpose-built models.

If you have a security problem, you normally turn to a security guy. If you have a wireless problem, you're going to turn to a wireless networking guy. We recognize that, listen, there are going to be specialists in each one of these things, and so how can we codify that into models?

Because yes, they're great frontier models, and they solve very interesting problems, but if I wanted to train a model specifically on certain types of things, I'm going to need to use a purpose-built model. So we built something- And there's a lot of reasons for that. There are reasons.

Not the least of which is tokens. That's exactly right. So it's really important that when you have a model that is optimized for it, it's not going to overuse your tokens, right?

Right. It's going to use the right amount of tokens. It's going to give you a response with the right amount of latency.

It has the right cost profile. And it has the right answer. Exactly right.

I agree with you. Look, this is where we have to go, not just in Cisco. Yeah.

We've got to do this across the board. You can't use the same tool for every job. And you couldn't have said it better.

I agree with you. I wrote it today, too. Yeah.

You got me at hello on this, okay? Love it. Unfortunately, DJ, I'd like to talk to you all day about it, but I see our next guest waiting here.

Oh, our next guest is here. Hey. But you know what?

Where can people stay up on this? com. You're going to find links to Cloud Control, and you'll see detailed demos.

In fact, it also has the third part of it, which is the open ecosystem part. I was going to mention that. 50-plus partners.

You launched with 50-plus, 52-something partners already. Yes. For my vendor friends out there, hey, man, this is your chance to jump in on this right from the ground floor.

Right? Hey, absolutely. In fact, we got a lot of companies, a lot of startups over there, too.

Mm. So would love to have a lot of folks come participate in the marketplace. But, hey, thanks so much for having me.

This is absolutely a pleasure talking to you. You know what? They got it in good hands over there.

I'm glad to hear this. Oh, thank you so much. All right.

Hey, we're here at Cisco Live. We've got more. I think we might have an LSU Tiger coming out.

That's right. I don't know why. My kids went to UF.

They couldn't get me a Gator. But anyway. We're here.

We're watching Techstrong TV. We'll be right back. All right.