AI, security tailwinds signal promising 2026 for Cisco

In many ways, 2025 was the year Cisco got its product strategy right under the leadership of its chief product officer, Jeetu Patel. Splunk assimilation took hold, and we saw integrations with security, observability, networking and more. In addition, the core of Cisco’s product line—campus networking—underwent a major refresh with new Catalyst Smart Switches and Wi-Fi 7 access points. And after having made bold predictions about how AI would create a significant lift for the company, Cisco blew by its original target of $1 billion for AI infrastructure and ultimately rallied to more than $2 billion. All of this led to its stock price reaching levels not seen since the dot-com boom.

As the new year kicks off, continued execution is critical. Here’s what customers, partners, and the rest of the industry should expect from Cisco in 2026.

AI infrastructure: Edge and physical AI

Cisco expects its AI infrastructure business to generate roughly $3 billion in revenue in 2026. However, the opportunity for Cisco could be much larger than that as AI will create significant traffic pattern changes. Agentic AI agents generate up to 25x more network traffic than simple chatbots. Also, physical AI is coming, and it will drive increased inferencing traffic at the edge of networks.

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To meet this demand, Cisco is leaning four core pillars:

• Data center infrastructure. While there are many other vendors that offer data center AI infrastructure, it’s arguable that Cisco has the broadest and most complete offering. The company has refreshed the Nexus (networking) and UCS (portfolios), has a deep partnership with Nvidia, and its AI factory has a massive ecosystem around it.
• Unified edge: Expect the maturation of Cisco’s unified edge box, which integrates compute, networking, and storage into a single system designed to process AI workloads locally and securely. At the recent NRF 2026 event, Cisco showed how the appliance can be used to bring new experiences, such as AI-enabled holograms, to retailers.
• Campus refresh: As mentioned above, Cisco has revamped its campus portfolio for the rigors of the agentic era. Typically, customers refresh the wired campus network every 5-7 years and Wi-Fi every 3-5 years. However, from my conversations with network engineers, if AI does generate as much traffic as forecasted, we could see organizations move up their refresh timeline, creating a rising tide for the industry. Given Cisco is the majority shareholder, this is a massive opportunity for Cisco.
• AI Canvas: Look for the full-scale rollout of AI Canvas, a generative AI interface that allows network operators to manage complex configurations and troubleshooting through natural language. Cisco is often criticized—some of which is valid—for having too many management tools. AI Canvas complements the other tools and enables cross functional capabilities. Early customer and partner feedback has been more than positive.

Secure networking: Every port is a firewall

While AI grabs headlines, security is Cisco’s biggest needle-moving opportunity.

The boundary between networking and security will effectively disappear in 2026. The security industry is massive, but it’s highly fragmented with no vendor having even 10% share. Cisco has always had good security products but no real cyber strategy. Now, Cisco has shifted its focus from security as an overlay to a native function of the network. This is in line with my research, which has found that more than 80% of network engineers today have security as part of their remit.

While there are many network and security vendors working towards the concept of “security networking,” Cisco is arguably the only one that has strengths in both domains. Under Patel, Cisco has rethought its security product and go-to-market approach. Over the past year, it has announced several new products including AI Defense, Hybrid Mesh Firewall, and a revamped SSE stack.

Also, with the integration of Splunk’s data analytics and ThousandEyes visibility, Cisco is shifting from reactive security to preemptive cybersecurity. AI-powered systems will analyze behavioral patterns in real-time, detecting anomalies and deploying countermeasures before a threat can even be unleashed. The launch of the Cisco Security Cloud will provide a single, unified console to manage this secure-by-design architecture across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.

Partner evolution: Cisco 360 program

Partners are in Cisco’s DNA, with that audience driving more than 90% of Cisco’s business. This month marks the official launch of the Cisco 360 Partner Program, which is the most significant overhaul of Cisco’s channel strategy in nearly three decades. The traditional “gold, silver, premier” hierarchy is being replaced by a flatter, more inclusive structure: Cisco Partner and Cisco Preferred Partner.

This evolution moves away from rewarding purely transactional volume and instead focuses on:

• Partner Value Index (PVI): A new metric that measures partner success across four dimensions: foundational elements, capabilities, performance, and engagement.
• Specialization over architecture: Partners will no longer be certified just in routing or switching, for example. Instead, they will earn specializations in outcomes such as “secure AI infrastructure” or “digital resilience.”
• Co-selling and ecosystems: The program incentivizes partners to work together, recognizing that an AI deployment might require a consultant, a managed service provider, and an ISV working in tandem.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program has been in the making for the better part of 18 months and is an excellent example of the attention Cisco pays to its channel. When the program first launched, it was met with strong pushback, but under the leadership of Tim Coogan, Cisco worked closely with its partners to get feedback and modified the program accordingly.

Recently, I asked Brian Ortbals, senior vice president at World Wide Technology (WWT), one of Cisco’s largest partners, about the program, he told me: “Cisco took a collaborative approach with the 360 program, and it made a real difference. They listened, engaged deeply with partners like WWT, and incorporated meaningful feedback along the way. The result is a clearer, more predictable model that helps us deliver better outcomes for customers.”

Services transformation: From reactive to predictive

At the NRF show, I was talking with Mario Castro, vice president, Americas, for cloud and AI infrastructure at Cisco, and he mentioned how the event has transitioned from being a technology show to one based on business outcomes. If that’s true, and I believe it is, why are the services that companies offer to support their technology still reactive in nature?

Late last year, Cisco announced that its services arm, known as Cisco CX, launched a new platform called Cisco IQ, designed to shift services from reactive to proactive with the ultimate goal of zero-downtime networking.

The proactive and predictive model will be enabled by leveraging the massive datasets from Splunk, ThousandEyes and other sources of Cisco telemetry. Instead of calling support after a failure, customers will receive AI-driven “guided remediations” that identify potential hardware failures or configuration bottlenecks days before they impact the business. This services-as-a-platform approach will allow enterprises to scale their AI ambitions without needing to linearly scale their IT headcount.

It’s a big change and will require IT to rethink how they interact with Cisco, but it’s long overdue. The current break-react-fix model has been in place since I was an engineer. Everything else in IT has changed—now it’s time for services to evolve.

Collaboration rebound: Built on trust

At one time, Cisco collaboration was the industry’s de facto standard. Since then, the likes of Zoom and Microsoft Teams have taken chunks of share, and massive share shift happened during the pandemic. Lately, Cisco’s collaboration business unit has made strides in catching up in core features and leading the industry in AI features and devices. But despite the innovation, share gain has been challenging.

At this time, I believe many of the macro issues around the world favor Cisco. One of the biggest issues is trust. I attended the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, and while the main topic was AI, trust was a core subtopic. Trust as talked about at Davos comes in many forms, including governmental and economic. But, with AI, leaders need to trust the systems to have confidence in deployments.

A big component of AI in communications is agentic agents talking to employees and customers, and bringing trust to the system is where Cisco should shine. It builds and runs its own infrastructure, which is secure by design. Cisco has relationships with governments all over the world, and between Webex and its on-premises solutions, it can meet any kind of digital sovereignty requirements.

As the world becomes increasingly AI driven and fractured because of macro issues, Cisco will be able to deliver solutions that work, are secure, and adhere to any kind of compliance requirements. Look for the company to lean into trust to reestablish the Webex business.

Continued focus on Purpose: From one billion lives to 40 communities

While the technology is complex, Cisco’s guiding North Star remains its commitment to its Purpose corporate social responsibility programs. Having surpassed its goal to positively impact one billion lives, Cisco is doubling down on its 40 Communities initiative. In 2026, expect significant investments in:

• AI for social good: Using agentic AI to optimize energy consumption in smart buildings and reduce carbon footprints.
• The digital divide: Continued expansion of the Cisco Networking Academy, which is being redesigned to focus on AI and cybersecurity skills for underserved regions.
• Resilient infrastructure: Rebuilding connectivity in disaster-prone areas with resilience-first networking that can withstand both physical and cyber shocks.

Evidence of this was seen in Davos, where Cisco reinforced its commitment to global reskilling, acting as a core partner in the Reskilling Revolution initiative. This initiative aims to equip 1 billion people with better education, skills, and economic opportunities by 2030, with a focus on addressing the rapid transformation of the labor market due to AI and the energy transition. 

Over the years, questions have been raised as to whether there’s a place for Purpose with publicly traded companies—not only for Cisco but also for its peers—as it can be viewed as a large cost item. This is a topic I’ve discussed over and over with Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people, policy and purpose officer. She has been firm in her belief that Purpose can be good for the world and good for business, and she pointed to the Country Digital Acceleration and HBCU investments as evidence of that. The more connected and digital the world becomes, the more demand there is for modernized infrastructure to enable it. So, don’t expect Cisco to back off Purpose any time soon.

The bottom line

As we enter 2026, Cisco is no longer just the plumbing of the internet. It has successfully positioned itself as having the best mission-critical infrastructure for the AI era. By tightly integrating silicon, security, and software—and completely reinventing how it goes to market with partners—Cisco is betting that the future of AI isn’t just in the model but in the network that connects and secures it all.

For IT leaders, the message should be obvious: The infrastructure you built for the 2010s will not survive the 2026 AI era. It’s time to modernize or get left behind.

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