AMD and Cisco Unveil AI Agent Management Approach Across Cloud, Data Centre, and Local Computing Environments

AMD and Cisco have outlined an approach to managing AI agents across cloud, data centre, and local computing environments during AMD's recent Advancing AI 2026 keynote. According to Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, 'Humans click, but agents swarm', highlighting how agentic AI is changing inference workloads.

Inference is now being used for reasoning, calling tools, and accessing data repeatedly while working towards a goal, rather than just providing a single response. Dr Lisa Su, President and CEO of AMD, linked rising demand for inference computing to this ability of agents. She estimated that over 35 quadrillion tokens are consumed each month, a nearly 160 times increase in two years.

Su attributed the shift to the number of people using AI and the development of agents that can continue working on a problem instead of returning a single response. This process requires both graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs), with AMD now expecting the AI accelerator market to reach around US$1.4 trillion by 2030.

Cisco's Patel said the change in inference patterns is also affecting where computing takes place, with security and cost being two concerns raised by customers. He identified network capacity as one requirement for supporting the bandwidth demands created by local agents. To address this, AMD presented its Ryzen AI Halo platform, which allows developers to build and test models on a desk-side system before scaling their work across other AMD computing platforms.