Voices of Cisco Live: Networking is Cool Again—And AI is Changing the Game
4 min read
Cisco Live EMEA 2026 is the industry leading event
Every Cisco Live is an amazing experience. It is a priceless chance to spend a full week at a major event alongside Cisco customers, partners, and colleagues, discussing the latest and greatest in networking. The event features hundreds of breakout sessions, dozens of keynotes and major theatre sessions, and many private meetings scheduled with audiences ranging from top field experts to market analysts. We also offer a huge exhibition floor with labs that provide the opportunity to experiment with technology, whether provided directly by Cisco or by the many partners and suppliers in our ecosystem.
It is no coincidence that a common experience for every attendee is the challenge of choosing between multiple appealing events or sessions happening at the same time. That is precisely why it is a week-long event: it provides different opportunities to access all the content you are looking for, and even to discover content you had not anticipated finding as a priority. For someone who loves IT in general, and networking in particular, there simply isn’t anything like it!
AI is making it even more relevant
Still, the vibe in Amsterdam this year was different—louder and more intense. There was more curiosity, and definitely a sense of excitement and urgency all around. This was the first Cisco Live EMEA where the impact of AI was structurally felt; it was entrenched in every booth, present in every breakout, and included in every product or service.
AI was already on the agenda in 2025, but by then, most people were still trying to figure it out. It was unclear how it would be used or how real the practical use cases would be. There were already many ideas being presented, but not much felt like it was just around the corner, and there were genuine concerns about how much was marketing versus actual reality. Even then, there were concerns about job security for IT professionals, which created some sense of anxiety.
AI as a Productivity Multiplier for Engineers
This time, it was different. There was excitement in the air, with AI genuinely perceived as an opportunity. The vast majority of the audience had already played with it in some form or shape and saw it not as a threat, but as a productivity multiplier. The hands-on experience built the trust that took us all to the next level. The feeling now was not, “I won’t be able to do my job because of AI,” but rather, “AI will allow me to do my job in a much more efficient way, and I have plenty of ideas on how to do it.” All those planned projects about optimizing the network, business operations, and even my day-to-day job—which I could not implement because I was sorting out emergencies or overwhelmed with “run-the-business” priorities—felt tangible and doable now.
Designing network services in the ideal way with a tool that can read all variables and, based on engineer guidance, tune the right priorities; troubleshooting with a full, deep understanding of everything happening in my network; and proactive security responses—all of this was shown for the first time as a new world unfolding before our eyes. And as a cherry on top, “Networking for AI” is making the industry feel more valuable than ever, where planning and operating networks at scale, with the specifications and service quality capable of handling LLMs, is absolutely business-critical and value-unlocking.
The Cisco IQ transformation
This brings me to the most exciting capability showcased at Cisco Live: Cisco IQ. I had the incredible opportunity to lead the Cisco IQ booth, which also included a few public speaking sessions. Cisco IQ is a unified, AI-powered interface that transforms how customers and partners interact with Cisco Support and Professional Services. It delivers a single source of truth for infrastructure inventory by integrating data from purchase contracts, device telemetry, and support cases. This enables the proactive prevention of outages through AI-driven insights and prioritized recommendations. It does all of that while providing a natural language model to deep-dive into these datasets and insights in natural human language. You can customize your requests, adjust troubleshooting, ask questions, and navigate across configurations. This is not by reading “show commands,” but by making requests in the way you think. By automating and digitizing services, Cisco IQ accelerates issue resolution and enhances operational efficiency, all embedded within Cisco’s paid CX offerings without additional cost.
The human value in the centre of it all
I could not end this without bringing the human factor to the center of it all. AI is becoming an amazing tool to take networking to a new level. It is moving further away from CLI and predetermined syntax or workflows, and closer to the way a human thinks. That is why the engineer is still at the center of it all and is more relevant than ever. The many years of experience, the CCIE and certifications, and the countless hours planning and designing IT are more critical than ever.
We are getting to a new world where the engineer can quickly upskill those areas of expertise to plan, design, and troubleshoot entire domains or the whole network holistically, and much, much faster. Data and patterns are generated quickly and in real-time with the right questions. Decisions are fast in a truly impactful way. Even decisions like allowing self-remediation or closed-loop automation—which have been an industry “holy grail” for a long time—will be enabled or disabled resulting from human design, together with the control mechanisms or even control agents that the human has defined. Cisco Live showed the first meaningful look at a brand-new world… and it is an exciting one!
This article is part of our mini-series, Voices of Cisco Live, where we follow different Cisco employees who had their own unique experience and perspective on the event.
Authors
