Cisco $CSCO unveiled a unified platform on Monday that lets businesses build and deploy AI agents to manage and defend their IT infrastructure, as cybersecurity threats increasingly arrive from automated systems acting at machine speed.
The platform, called Cisco Cloud Control, was announced at the company's Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas. It gives operators a single login and shared view across networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration, allowing human teams and AI agents to work from the same data layer, the company said.
"You can no longer do things at human scale," DJ Sampath, senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform at Cisco, told Reuters. "It has to be machine scale, from an operational perspective."
Named Cisco Cloud Control, the system is built to let businesses and governments deploy AI agents capable of monitoring their infrastructure, neutralizing threats, and ejecting intruders, along with a range of other defensive functions. Cisco executives told Reuters that the shift reflects a new reality in which attackers are deploying waves of automated agents, making a machine-speed response from IT defenders no longer optional.
A central security feature called Live Protect functions as a runtime shield for Cisco products, blocking newly discovered vulnerabilities without requiring reboots, upgrades, or maintenance windows. The tool is now available on Cisco's N9000 series switches and will expand to campus and branch smart switches, followed by secure routers later in the year, the company said.
Cisco also announced that any newly introduced campus, branch, and data center routers, switches, and firewall products will launch with quantum-safe secure boot, as part of a broader commitment to enable quantum-safe communications across the majority of its core portfolio by December 2026. New Quantum Ready Assessments, available through Cisco's AI-powered services tool Cisco IQ, will help customers identify assets most exposed to so-called "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, with global availability planned for July 2026.
As a way to accelerate the development of defensive agents, Cisco introduced a marketplace modeled on an app store, giving customers access to a curated selection of coding tools. OpenAI's Codex is the launch offering, integrated natively into Cloud Control rather than accessed through a separate interface, according to Reuters. Sampath indicated that Cisco intends to collect revenue from marketplace transactions, though the specific structure of that arrangement remains undecided.
Cloud Control also includes a customization environment called Cloud Control Studio, which features an Agent Builder for creating agents tailored to a company's own workflows, and an App Builder for constructing applications from natural-language prompts. The platform connects to more than 50 third-party tools, including AWS, Microsoft $MSFT, Google $GOOGL Cloud, ServiceNow $NOW, and Slack $WORK, the company said.
U.S. customers gained access to Cisco Cloud Control on Monday under a controlled rollout, with the rest of the world expected to follow before year's end. Sampath told Reuters that the third-party tool marketplace is on track to open sometime after July.