Cisco Connects AI Agent Security and Intelligent Workplaces

Hey everyone. We're back here with our coverage of WebX one in Austin, Texas. My next guest is Michael Dickman of Cisco.

Michael's going to tell you all about what he does at Cisco. But Michael, I'd like to know what you did before Cisco, and if you wouldn't mind sharing with the audience a little bit of your background. Yeah, sure.

Well, one of the things I did before Cisco was Cisco. Really? So that was my first.

You're a boomerang. I'm a boomerang. Yeah, so originally at Cisco I was in the routing side.

Uh-huh. And so I did the branch routers, and I was in some of the early days of SD-WAN. Uh-huh.

And then I went into switching and wireless at some other places, at Aruba Networks, you know, with EE. Sure. And then I did something pretty different the last five years, which was more data center, cloud, security, observability, with a company called Gigamon.

Which I know well. Which is all about kind of deep observability around- Mm ... you really learn from network metadata.

And now back to campus and branch networking. So they pulled you back in. That's right, just like the Godfather.

Yeah. So we talk about campus and branch managing, right? For a company with Cisco's footprint and Cisco's product line, makes perfect sense.

A lot of people out here, though, they hear campus and branch management, they're thinking, "Oh, is he wiring colleges," right? Or universities or branch management, franchises or something like this. But that's not, I mean, that's part of it.

It is part of it, yeah. But it's not the heart of it. Talk to us about what the heart of campus networking and branch management is in your role.

Yeah, sure. I mean, one way to think about it is the workplace. Mm-hmm.

So we talk about future-proof workplace, and that's really probably a better term because it's anywhere that work is getting done by people, things, and agents. Is maybe a way to think about that. So big customers would be hospitals, banks, factories, warehouses, and also college campuses and schools and regular office buildings, retail stores, whether big box or small.

So it's anywhere that work is getting done, that needs to have connectivity. That connectivity has to be secure. And you need to be able to have assurance around the applications and user experience of that entire environment.

So that's really the scope of the problem. I remember a time where, actually, I had started my own, co-founded my own company. We were selling a lot to the federal government, DoD.

Mm-hmm. I was talking, I was at an Army base, I think it was Fort Carson in Colorado. And the CISO of an Army base is called a DUMA.

Don't ask me what DUMA stands for. I know it's information assurance, but in any event, I remember asking them what they were doing for wireless security. And he said, "Oh, we don't have a wireless security problem.

" Right? And as he's saying that, I see people unplugging their WAPs and throwing them under the table, right? Because they weren't allowed to use them.

But we don't live in a world where everything's wired with Ethernet Cat 5, Cat 6, or what have you. Mm-hmm. Right?

We live in, most environments are at best mixed use, if not totally wireless. And what is it, Wi-Fi 8 standard is now being- Yeah, well, so we're in the middle of Wi-Fi 7, and then Wi-Fi 8 is next. Yeah, as the technology marches on.

Yeah. But that's a profound change for a company like Cisco, right? That kind of is bread and butter with switches- Sure ...

and network gear. But now wireless, I'm going to say, has at least equal footing, if not on top. Yeah.

No, I think it's a great observation that it's a wireless first world. Yeah. It's natural, I would say.

You said it's kind of a big change for Cisco. I think it's very natural, because Cisco is all about how do we connect people and things to get their work done. So it's very natural.

The other thing I would say is behind a great wireless network is a great wired network. So you can't forget that. It's not just WAPs.

At some point it hits the world, the physical world. Rubber meets the road. Yeah.

Or fiber meets fiber. Yeah. But then also going back to what you were saying earlier about, hey, what is the scope of campus and branch?

It may not be you and I who are connecting via Wi-Fi or via switching, as much. Desktops are replaced by laptops and whatnot. But if you look at MRI machines, badge readers, door locks- Sure ...

" To neural devices. Yeah, and so if you are a network operator, the world is absolutely hybrid. If you're a human walking around, it's wireless first, and we need to deliver on a brilliant wireless first experience, and everything that comes with that.

And make sure that everything, whether wired or wireless, has consistent, secure connectivity, including the backhaul network behind it. I love it. Well said.

Thank you. Well said. You mentioned agents, and that hyped my ears perked right up.

Look, AI and agents are changing everything that we're doing. Mm-hmm. How are you planning, or how is the whole agentic thing playing into your plans and your strategies?

Yeah. So what's happening very quickly and just across the board is using agents, agentic operations, to improve the experience of managing a network, managing a workplace, making all that secure, all of that observable. That's happening, 1,000%.

So helping the operator be successful. I think the heart of your question is what about the general use and adoption of agents in the world? How does that affect things?

And it's early. I do think that what's happening right now with personal agents, Muse from Meta or Dots from OpenAI, and so on, it's almost like the second ChatGPT moment, right? Which is, it's all of a sudden become really easy to deploy a personal agent.

And although, yes, this is kind of looking around corners versus it's here today. I do think we're going to see rapid proliferation of personal agents. Which will then bring up the question, how do you authenticate them?

How do you know what they're allowed to do? How do you enforce that? What we've already seen, and actually my team has even done some internal testing on this, we've already seen that the agents actually have different behavior on the network.

Mm. So if I ask you to please go find some information or take some action, your traffic profile would be very bursty with lots of inaction. If you used ChatGPT to get help, you'd be a little more bursty a little more frequently.

The agentic workflow is much more sustained. Solid. And it's not only north-south, there's also more east-west, because there's a lot of local resources, right?

You need to talk to this system or that system or your peer. And so we're expecting more bandwidth, more symmetric traffic north-south, more lateral traffic east-west, and complexity in identities. Now, to say what's already happening today that's not futuristic, in factories this has happened.

So there are not only kind of classic robots, but we're seeing an example in auto manufacturers just said two weeks ago. They're replacing their automated guided vehicles, AGVs, which have to follow a preset path. Yeah.

You follow on the floor. Like the kids used to play with cars like that, right? Yeah.

It's like the slot trackers. So those are being evolved into AMRs, autonomous mobile robots. And they can go anywhere, and they can do anything, which is awesome.

Efficiency, flexibility, et cetera. But that needs absolute precise location. It cannot handle latency.

It's a safety issue, right? And of course, security becomes even more important. And that is agentic.

That's AI that's happening right now in that context. That's what I wanted to talk to you about, right? We talk about agents and agentic.

Mm-hmm. Every day's a new story. This rogue agent went rogue here.

That rogue agent went rogue there. It would seem to me that Cisco is in a perfect catbird seat to maybe supply a little of these guardrails that we keep hearing about, and policies that'll... Oh, I'm sorry.

That's a fun ride. Yeah, I know, but I should've shut this off. Why did he do that there, sir?

Anyways, it's Mitchell Ashley, one of the future analyst friends. But all right. He's a college friend.

Yeah. Let me restart it. Security and rogue agents and whatnot.

So- So Paul, this is going to go back about 30 seconds, so I'm going to... So Michael, though, you bring up agents and every day we're hearing about a rogue agent attack this place, a rogue agent got into that. Everybody, if you're a model maker and your rogue agent hasn't broken in somewhere, you're not a good model and you're not making good agents.

It would seem to me that Cisco's in the catbird seat to help install these guardrails that we're talking about. Mm-hmm. Keeping agents within a confine without letting them maybe get out to the internet within a confined space or predefined space, while still being able to do their jobs.

Exactly. Do you consider that part of Cisco's mission at this point? Absolutely.

So there's a couple dimensions there, right? So one is agentic observability and security, which actually is watching the agentic behavior itself. Mm-hmm.

But the other piece is how the infrastructure can support all that, and this is why I do think Cisco is in the catbird seat, as you said. Mm-hmm. Because we can not only have, call it classic endpoint agents or other types of observability and security for agentic workloads, which we're doing.

You have some acquisitions we've made with organic development, but also we can see agentic behavior on the network, and we can use everything we've done over the years with segmentation, with identity-based policies, with network-based security to provide that firm guardrail, if you will. Right? And so you think about it, the agents do have identities.

They do. Sometimes they can be hidden beneath or underneath a human's identity, or they can have their own identity. Either way, the network becomes that layer of defense that cannot be bypassed.

And so it is possible at that layer that you're not relying on the agent to self-police. Right? You can go back to guardrails, and it's like they all have their own internal guardrails, which is good, and I hope that's successful.

But we don't trust that on its own. So you need additional guardrails around the workload itself, but the network becomes this ubiquitous interconnectivity layer that can provide that as a firm guardrail for encryption, for access, for network-based security. I love it.

And I do, when I said catbird seat, I wasn't kidding. I do think you're our last best hope, Obi-Wan. Right?

Someone's got to put these guardrails in here. Look, we're here at Webex One, so I think we should talk a little bit about Webex and communications. Yeah.

But there's a unique relationship between Webex and that ilk of communication and the network, right? Again, it rides on top of the network. No network, you don't have any communication.

Talk to us about that as, and obviously you have a point of view on it from where you sit. Mm-hmm. You're campus networking.

Yeah. But from that point of view, how does this all fit in together? Yeah, sure.

So you think about, and going back to my core focus of the workplace, and the workplace networking as we talked about, the collaboration technology is all right on top of that. So like of course you need a secure network. But there's so much we can do if we build it together and purposefully.

So you take something like Webex, you can actually have network-based assurance, right? So was that a good meeting? Did you have a good call?

Did your messages go through? The Webex application and the integration with our ThousandEyes product for assurance with network telemetry can give you that end-to-end view, because the problem might be your client. Right.

The problem might be the Wi-Fi, it might be the switching, or it might be just some internet outage. But in being able to see that end-to-end view that starts from the collaboration on the client and it goes through that entire experience end to end with assurance is so powerful. But I think it goes even beyond meetings and that experience, like with the Webex product.

There's also the Cisco collaboration devices, and they are not only providing a collaboration service, they're also physically in rooms, right? So you walk into a room, you have this great experience. There's a video, a nice meeting.

That same device can measure the air quality in the room. It can count the number of people in the room. " And I was just meeting an hour ago here, with a very large financial services company that has 60 buildings around the world, and they have a big problem with ghosted meetings.

People book the room, they don't show up. And they have the opposite problem of camping. People didn't book the room, and they do show up.

Or they book the room and then stay over like squatters. Yeah, exactly. That happened to me, too.

And so how do you know that's happening? You could send people around with clipboards, which makes no sense. A much better solution is to look and see where are people physically to have a middleware layer of software that can then provide that information to facilities.

Which is what we do. And we can look at people in conference rooms, thanks to our collaboration devices. We can see people in general and in motion, thanks to our Wi-Fi.

We can see the connectivity of things through our wired going back to the world being hybrid. And so you start to know everything that's in the workplace. Where is it, the current state, where is it moving?

Questions like power usage and so on. All of that in one nice package. And you can solve networking problems, right?

Like maybe something got unplugged or maybe there's not enough Wi-Fi coverage. You can solve collaboration problems, end-to-end assurance, helping people actually get to the rooms that they need. You can solve security problems and physical real estate problems.

And so there's so much power that comes from thinking of the workplace as an intelligent ecosystem instead of it's a building, let's put a access point on the ceiling, and then here's a little camera. Right? That's very kind of point product, but building consciously for the future, there's so much we can do.

And it's a very exciting time. Will I have a flying car? As of today, I can tell you Cisco is not planning on a flying car.

No flying cars yet. All right. But I'll have to settle for a connected workplace.

But I took a Waymo yesterday, and- I did that ... that would've been a joke a year ago. Now it's real.

No, it's very real. Yeah. And those little cyber Tesla things are wild looking, too.

Cyber truck, right? Yeah, they look pretty crazy, too. But maybe we'll do one tonight.

Anyway, Michael, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on here on Techstrong TV. Come back and visit.

We don't have to wait till we're at a thing. We do this remotely, three hours every day. So whenever you have something to talk about, come on in.

I enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks.

Michael Dickman here from Cisco. We are continuing our coverage at Webex One from Austin. We'll have more, so stay tuned.

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