News
At Cisco Partner Conference, Secure AI a Top Priority
- By Gladys Rama
- October 26, 2026
Cisco urged its partners this week to see the proliferation of network security threats -- both resulting from, and remediated by, AI -- as an opportunity.
The infrastructure giant's 30th partner summit is taking place this week in Vancouver, B.C. At keynotes and briefings alike, executives identified security as a top channel priority.
"The network is the new attack surface in the enterprise," said Alex Pujols, CTO and VP of Solutions Engineering of Cisco Global Partner Sales, in a Monday press event. He explained that autonomous AI agents are making networks exponentially vulnerable because they generate roughly 450 percent more traffic than a human performing the same task. "We want agents to be verbose...but that has a really interesting impact on the network."
There are no signs of a slowdown as AI remains a factor. In the general keynote, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said the company expects AI traffic to double every six months. "These agents don't stop for dinner," he said. "They work 24/7."
Cisco executives singled out specialized frontier models like Anthropic's Mythos as redefining the security role of Cisco's partners. Mythos, currently in preview, has been found to be singularly effective at surfacing security vulnerabilities in the most popular operating systems and browsers, including those that have evaded detection for as long as two decades. Major enterprise tech players like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Cisco are using Anthropic to identify weaknesses in their product stacks in an Anthropic-led initiative called Project Glasswing.
According to Pujols, models like Mythos have shortened the time to exploit from over two years (starting with the initial attack) to eight hours. It's a "post-Mythos world," Robbins later added.
Besides accelerated vulnerability discovery driven by Mythos, Cisco pointed out that end user customers are also dealing with security implications around post-quantum cryptography, nation-state attacks fueled by today's geopolitical environment, evolving regulatory demands, and AI agents breaking out of their sandboxes and attacking rival vendors.
Pujols described four different opportunity buckets in AI risk management for partners. One is in advisory services, helping customers identify risks and implement guardrails. Two is in managed services, leveraging Cisco's investment in Splunk and the company's own AI Defense product. Three is in Cisco's bread and butter of connectivity and networking. And four is in specialization within the Cisco 360 program.
Cisco's focus on AI security is mirrored in its own partners. During the keynote, channel chief Tim Coogan cited a Cisco survey showing 33 percent of its partners consider AI security a key growth opportunity.