Cisco Sees Multi-Year Networking Boom Driven by AI Agents

Cisco Systems executives say they're seeing a multi-year networking boom driven by demand for AI agents, infrastructure modernization, and security. President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel stated that AI agents consume about 60% of total inference capacity and their token consumption has increased 14-fold since February.

The growing use of AI agents is creating sustained infrastructure requirements rather than demand limited to experimentation or model training, said Patel. An agent uses about 450% more bandwidth than a human performing the same task, he estimated.

Cisco sees opportunities across various customer segments, including hyperscalers, neoclouds, sovereign clouds, service providers, enterprises, and edge deployments. The company's hyperscaler AI orders rose from nearly zero two years ago to $9.3 billion in the last fiscal year, including $4 billion in orders during the fourth quarter.

Cisco's campus and branch networking business has expanded about 20% for several quarters, attributed to infrastructure refresh cycles, demand for lower-latency networking, and heightened security concerns around aging equipment.