Cisco and Splunk Connect AI Data, Security and Tokenomics
AI Data Security Becomes a Business Priority
AI data security is moving to the center of enterprise technology strategy as organizations race to adopt agents, copilots and AI-enabled workflows. In this Techstrong TV interview from SplunkConf 2026, Alan Shimel talks with Seth Brickman about why Cisco and Splunk see the AI era as both exhilarating and exhausting.
Brickman says the speed of AI advancement has changed the way enterprises think about responsibility. Some companies are eager to lead. Others feel pushed into adoption before they have the right controls. That creates a serious challenge. Teams need to understand whether AI is solving a real business problem, what it costs and whether it is safe enough to trust.
From Silicon to Agent
The conversation highlights Cisco and Splunk’s combined position across infrastructure, data, security and observability. Brickman describes the value of helping customers from the chip and compute layer all the way to agents that must be observed and secured.
That matters because AI depends on data. AI also creates new data at massive scale. If teams cannot observe the output of AI systems, they cannot protect the input that feeds those systems. AI data security depends on closing that loop.
Cisco Data Fabric and Agent Observability
Brickman also discusses Cisco Data Fabric, federated data capabilities, low-cost machine data storage and Splunk Agent Observability. Together, those capabilities are aimed at helping enterprises manage the data gravity problem while preparing for agentic workflows.
The goal is not to add more tools. It is to converge data, observability and security around business outcomes. That approach gives teams a better way to understand what their AI systems are doing, where risk is emerging and how those systems affect operations.
Tokenomics Adds Cost Awareness
The interview also explores tokenomics, a new requirement for AI governance. Brickman notes that enterprises can quickly exceed AI budgets because token costs are difficult to understand and compare. A token is not like a dollar. Its cost can vary by model, workload and use case.
For technology leaders, the takeaway is clear. Responsible AI adoption requires visibility into value, risk and cost. Cisco and Splunk are positioning AI data security, observability and tokenomics as the foundation for helping enterprises use AI safely, efficiently and with confidence.
Transcript
Hey everyone, we're back here with our Splunk Conf 2026 coverage from Denver. I love coming to Denver. I used to live out or had a house out here, and coming here makes me think of some great times during the early 2000s when security was just kind of, well, we started calling it cyber instead of InfoSec, right?
Sure. When I first started, it was just InfoSec, and all of a sudden someone came up with this cybersecurity thing. I want to introduce you, though, to our next guest.
His name is Seth Brickman. Seth, first of all, welcome to Techstrong TV. It's great to have you on here.
Thank you. I'm going to let you introduce yourself, if you wouldn't mind. Tell people a little bit of kind of-- Well, let's start with your journey, how you came to Splunk, Cisco, actually Cisco, and then we'll go from there.
Yeah, absolutely. So thank you for having me. My pleasure.
Started out life in the United States Navy. I was a nuclear engineer, got to build a nuclear submarine, do some really cool things with that. Thankfully, Sprint, the telecom company, recognized the analytical capability of Navy nukes, and so they recruited me out of the military to go work for them.
And then I realized I had this unique ability, or my superpower, was helping businesses understand how to use technology to solve their real problems. So I found myself at Microsoft and then at Amazon, and then I was the CEO of a tech company for a while. I had a very successful exit, and then a good buddy of mine here at Cisco called me up and said, "Hey, there's this thing called Splunk.
" Wow. And you don't turn that down. Splunk's an amazing company.
They had just been- Oh, exactly ... acquired by Cisco, and so I just saw the magic that was going to happen when you bring those two powerhouses together. I love it.
What a story that is, though, right? First, they're always talking about nuclear engineers, rocket scientists. But in this case, you're a real live- Absolutely ...
nuclear engineer. " I know rocket science, exactly. You know rocket science, but it's an interesting thing.
Now, your mission here-- Well, first of all, let's talk a little bit about Splunk and Cisco, and then we'll talk about your mission. Our audience is a technical audience. They know Splunk.
They know Cisco. They are two powerhouse companies that have a real track record of delivering solutions, not just one time or two times, but time after time after time, right? They've both been at the forefront of every wave we see.
Of course, we're living, or we're on the precipice. I think we're in the wave already. We're not just on the precipice.
Or perhaps the biggest wave you and I are going to see in our careers- Absolutely ... right, this AI wave. And so in many ways, the stakes have never been higher, but the rewards have never been higher.
As an entrepreneur, as an operator, the passion, the fun of what is possible- Yeah ... has never been higher. I got to imagine that's part of what drew you in here.
It really is, and when you think about Cisco and their acquisition of Splunk, one of the unique things about Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco- Sure ... is his foresight of where the market's headed versus where the market is. Yeah.
It was many years ago that he brought Cisco into making their own chips. It sounded like craziness back when he did it, and today it is the most amazing idea he ever had. Well- And if you feel the same thing about Splunk.
Yeah. Bringing Cisco and Splunk together, that was him seeing the future. No doubt about it.
com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native now, all of these sites. com because for a lot of my career, it wasn't sexy. Right.
It was all x86, you know? Exactly. And maybe you got a little ARM game in there.
Then, of course, Qualcomm had mobile chips, but man, it has exploded now. The semi market is just out of control, and Cisco finds itself in a bit of a catbird seat, right? When we talk about, well, not only its own chips for its networking gear and everything else, but inference and everything else that you need to run today's- Right ...
modern stack. And when you combine that with Splunk, G2 talks about we're the only company that can help you from the silicon to the agent. Exactly.
Nobody else can, and that is an incredible mode to operate in because we can actually help you all the way from the chip and the compute to making sure your agents are observable and secure. And that's what this new AI era demands, right? It needs it.
Otherwise, there's a lot of risk. Absolutely. You don't know this, but we had interviewed a little earlier, a gentleman, Vikram Chaudhari.
Vikram, yeah. And we really got into the whole agentic AI piece of this now, and observability, and observing the agents, right? Yes.
To help manage them. Fascinating stuff. But you know what?
We didn't really tell people what you're doing here at Splunk, Cisco. I know it's one Cisco. It is.
But what's your role here as part of this? So I am the VP of Global Product Adoption, and what that really means is I help our customers understand from a business outcome perspective how the Splunk portfolio combined with the Cisco portfolio will actually solve the business problems they're dealing with. So my perspective is I don't care if you're McDonald's, if you're Carnival Cruise Lines, you're a tech company.
Mm-hmm. Right? You may say you're a tech company that sells burgers, you're a tech company that has cruise ships, but at the end of the day, you're still a tech company.
And tech companies have real problems, and that's the beauty of when you bring technology to those solutions, helping them understand how they can find all of the solutions they need, because the answer's not more tools, it's the convergence. Right. And that's why I love our message, because we bring that convergence, especially for here in the AI era.
Absolutely. Let's dig into that a little bit, here in the AI era. Yeah.
In some ways it's exhilarating, in some ways it's exhausting, right? Right. Both EXs.
How do you view that, and how do you live with both of those to make the best of it? Yeah. So, AI is advancing at a rate that nobody would've predicted.
Yeah. I get to work very closely with Anthropic. They're one of our core partners, and just watching what's happening at Anthropic and the things that they thought would take a year or several years, they're actually accomplishing in months.
And that's really what's happening with AI. And then you look at AI adoption across enterprises, and you see one of two things. " And then you're seeing the laggards that almost feel like they're being bullied into AI.
Yeah. " But that's not observable, it's not secure, and worse, they have no idea how much they're spending on those tokens. Yeah.
Because a token is not like a dollar, where if you and I each have a dollar, it's worth a dollar. Right. You and I each have a token, it could be a completely different cost.
It could be very different. Absolutely. And so that's the exhilarating and exhausting part, is it's moving so fast that it is exhilarating.
Keeping up with it is incredibly exhausting, because what you thought you knew yesterday can completely change for today. Yesterday's news, so it's not tomorrow. Think about a year ago, right?
We weren't talking about prompt hacking and data poisoning. No. And even if you think about just four to six months ago, we weren't talking about Mythos, and now we're talking about the post-Mythos era, right?
Things are changing faster than our minds can even wrap. Right. And look, to be fair, I'm not going to ignore it.
" Let me just say on the offset, when has humanity ever slowed down a new technology? Yeah. Right?
You can't snap your fingers and make the whole world do it. It doesn't work that way. That being said, I think our only course is assume it's going to go forward, figure out what can we do to safeguard, what can we do to put guardrails in, what can we do to do the...
You bring up security. I actually wrote a 30-page report last week on security in a post-Mythos world, what's important anymore. I founded three, four venture-backed companies.
All of a sudden, finding vulnerabilities. I wouldn't give you a dime for a company that finds vulnerabilities. Right.
Who would? Exactly. But what are you doing about those vulnerabilities?
What are you doing about the vulnerabilities that haven't been found? Our whole vision of security and what are the hot silo sectors in security- Yeah ... really changed within, what, two, three months?
Right. How do you... Now, Cisco and Splunk, this isn't some nimble startup with 35 engineers.
Right. This is a company, right? There's inertia here.
How do you change course and stay on top of that? So, the thing that we have done, and especially with all the things you just talked about, is we've listened to our customers, right? Right.
And so the way I like to talk about it is we know that data is the fuel for AI. Right. But AI then produces a ton of data.
And so it's not a line. It's a- It's a flywheel ... cycle, right?
It's a flywheel. And if you can't observe the output of your AI, you will not be able to secure the input of your AI- Right ... because it feeds itself.
Right. And so that's one of the things I think that's really unique about, for example, our Galileo acquisition- Yes ... which is now Splunk Agent Observability, the partnership with Cisco, and the ability to control security at the silicon level, and then the fact that Splunk brings an agentic SOC mixed with agentic observability, and then a data analytics platform that not only allows you to bring Splunk to your data through our new federation capabilities, but created a machine data lake for a low-cost data storage that allows Splunk to work its magic.
It's all of those pieces working together. That is what allows us to be able to respond to this event. Look, we weren't first to AI, but I think that has actually helped us because we have brought the best for AI now.
Right. I also think companies like Cisco, like Splunk, don't necessarily have to be first. I think there's that old founders startup dilemma, right?
Where you're first, you hack your way with a machete through the jungle- Yeah ... and then someone else walks the smooth road behind you. When you're Cisco, you got to wait for a market to develop even before you get in there.
So I think, and I also think we're so early in this journey, to tell you the truth- Yeah ... we're still learning almost every day. It's changing.
Well, it's changing every day. And it is changing every day, right? Six months ago, eight months ago, because we're in September already, right?
Yeah. It's hard to believe. But I loved what I was doing with generative AI.
Mm-hmm. Now it's all about the agents, right? That's right.
Yeah. And what my agents are doing for me. So I think we are seeing this.
Let's talk about responsibility, though, a little. Okay. What do you see as Splunk's, Cisco Splunk's responsibility to customers who are coming to you and saying, "Seth, what do we do?
" Yeah. So it's a great question, and the truth is, our number one responsibility to our customers is to give them the ability to adopt AI responsibly, efficiently, and safely. Right?
And so responsibly, understand the right AI for the problems you're trying to solve- Mm-hmm ... and make sure that the AI is actually solving the problem you set out to. It's easy to go buy an agent, it's easy to bring on Copilot, and all of these different tools.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they're solving a real problem. It just means you're burning tokens. That's exactly right.
Efficiently, right? There is a true cost to AI, and sadly, a lot of companies will adopt AI and not understand what they've done until they get the bill for it, and then it's become an issue. And so that's the beauty of, for example, what Tokenomics does- Yes ...
which is one of our newer products. It's actually going to help you understand how you're spending those tokens, but also help you do that efficiently. And then lastly is securely, right?
And that's really one of the most important things in this post-Mythos era, is that Splunk Cisco partnership is bringing security that's going to help you as an enterprise have the confidence that you can use AI in the right way, in a safe way, and that you've got a company that's standing behind you to make sure that you are having the outcomes you want without the outcomes you dread. I love it. I love the Tokenomics thing, by the way, too.
I think I mentioned it, we interviewed Vikram- Yeah ... Chatterjee, and that whole idea. I was telling you, we recently on Techstrong Gang discussed a survey that we, actually Futurum Group, our own company, did 1,600 organizations, 48% have exceeded their AI budgets.
Absolutely. We hear that all the time. Yep.
So roughly half. " 6%. Oh, wow.
Everyone else has just said, "Full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes," right? Yeah. " And I don't know, you're around as long as I am in this business.
Yeah. Have you ever seen anything like that before? You know, cloud adoption was close- I remember ...
but not like this ... not this frothy. Yeah.
I mean, I lived through the fiber dotcom thing. Not like this. Yeah.
It is. And I think a lot of it is just the lack of understanding that two tokens are not equal. Right.
Right? Because no one... So in that regard, it's like cloud bills.
Remember, the only thing worse than my cloud bill was my cell phone bill. Right? But- Oh, yeah ...
but at least you got a bill and you're able to kind of put... You need AI to figure out your token bill these days. You do.
I mean, it's- And that's one of the beauties of us bringing Tokenomics is- How mixed it is ... we actually help our customers understand where their token spend is occurring, and so that they can do the right things with their token spend, because yeah, otherwise you just get a bill, and you actually don't know what you did with that spend. Right.
And how do I, where can I turn a dial? If I can't turn a dial, many of us, I know from my own personal experience, we operate by turning dials. Yeah.
And I don't know what dials to turn. Last question, I'm going to let you go. Okay.
People at home weren't here, right? What should they be taking from this year's Splunk Conf to heart as they make their plans for 2027 and beyond? Yeah.
3 billion agents in operation. G2 talks about agents spend five times the amount of tokens as humans. Gartner says by 2028 that the cost of token spend for coding will exceed the cost of an engineer for the first time.
So when you see all of that, the thing you have to ask yourself is, who is going to be there to help me get through this, and not just get through it, but actually take advantage of AI and help me thrive in this agentic era, right? And that's what you're hearing at Conf this year. Yep.
You're hearing Splunk responding to their customers' needs and bringing the future of AI security and observability so that customers can adopt it responsibly and actually use it in a way that moves their business forward, versus just using it in a way... " Absolutely. Yeah.
Hey, man. Seth, thank you so much. Thank you.
Hey, that is going to wrap up our day one coverage of Splunk Conf. We'll be back tomorrow with more, but thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed it.
You're watching Techstrong TV.
