We're living through another major technological shift, one that's accelerating how work gets done across every layer of the enterprise. The rise of AI agents, dynamic workloads, and machine-to-machine learning is more than a series of advancements-it's reshaping the rhythm of enterprise networking operations.

Last summer, I had a conversation with a CIO customer from a large global enterprise. He said, "It feels like we're spending more time keeping up with separate management tools while flying blind, which adds overhead, risks, and misconfigurations."

We hear this a lot from customers: Your networks are growing more complex. You need better visibility, intelligent tools, and built-in multilayered assurance that reduce friction and risk while helping you stay ahead of problems.

At Cisco, we believe AI isn't just a new feature but a catalyst for reimagining and simplifying how networks are built, managed, and experienced to give you more control-for better outcomes.

With unified network management, we're bridging everything IT teams need across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments to turn complexity into intelligence and intelligence into action.

That includes multilayered assurance-giving you real-time visibility, actionable insights, and confidence in every digital experience, across both owned and unowned infrastructure.

The future of networking is now

At Cisco Live San Diego, we unveiled how unified management, powered by AI and multilayered assurance in the Meraki platform, is helping organizations of all sizes radically transform productivity.

This is the next chapter of our networking evolution: bringing together Meraki and Catalyst Center into an intuitive and powerful cloud-first experience from the Meraki dashboard, with flexibility to support any cloud, on-premises, or hybrid deployments.

This unified approach doesn't just simplify management-it embeds assurance throughout the platform, so you can see, understand, and improve digital experiences at every layer.

For customers managing on-premises environments, we'll continue to evolve Catalyst Center with even greater automation, deeper visibility, and enterprise scalability.

With common navigation experiences and workflows across the Meraki dashboard and Catalyst Center, day-to-day operations will be more intuitive, consistent, and faster.

APIs are also core to our platform vision: Across Catalyst Center and Meraki, we now have more than?1,600 API endpoints and 350+ apps in the Cisco Networking App Marketplace?(previously Meraki Marketplace). Built to be open and extensible, you can unlock new outcomes across AIOps, NetOps, SecOps, and more.

Powering IT with AgenticOps

Supercharging our networking platform is Cisco AgenticOps: an AI-driven approach to running modern IT operations that turns real-time telemetry, automation, and deep domain expertise into intelligent, end-to-end actions at machine speed-with you still in control.

Like the shift from GPS navigation to autonomous, self-driving cars, we're enabling networks to shift to networks that are predictive, self-healing, and self-optimizing.

At the center of our AgenticOps capabilities are Cisco AI Assistant and Cisco AI Canvas, built into the Meraki dashboard:

• Cisco AI Assistant (Assistive):From a conversational interface, ask natural language questions to quickly identify critical issues, diagnose root causes, and assist with network configurations-while maintaining control.
• Cisco AI Canvas (Collaborative):Coming soon, you'll have a single shared generative AI workspace to build custom dashboard visualizations for cross-domain troubleshooting and real-time collaboration across IT teams.

And because these tools operate with full context from both Meraki and Catalyst environments, they don't just guide automation-they amplify multilayered assurance by surfacing anomalies, mapping dependencies, and accelerating time to resolution.

What makes this even more powerful? The scale behind it. Our platform leverages powerful intelligence insights from Meraki and Catalyst Center, spanning more than 32 million devices and supporting over 1 billion clients. This reach gives us unparalleled learnings from real-world environments, making our AI smarter and more accurate at helping you solve problems.

Let's take a look at how our Cisco AI Assistant comes to life across our platform and assurance.

Simplifying operations with unified management and built-in assurance

Let's say your team is managing a large hybrid network deployment across on-premises and cloud, for your campuses and hundreds (or thousands) of branch locations. Before, that meant more disjointed workflows and tools, siloed data, and a lot of context-switching.

Now, your teams can work from one Meraki dashboard, one AgenticOps engine, with multilayered assurance.

The platform delivers:

• Unified management experiences:Manage your Meraki and Catalyst devices through the Meraki dashboard, with shared licensing and unified support for next-gen wireless, switching, and routing deployments through Cisco Networking Subscription.
• AgenticOps:Ask Cisco AI Assistant questions to automate routine tasks-the assistant pulls in data across your network and offers actionable next steps. For example:
  • Troubleshooting:Ask "What changed in our San Francisco campus switch config yesterday?" Get actionable answers tailored to your environment.
  • Assurance:Ask "What metrics are affecting my network and organization-wide health scores? What are the root causes behind any of these potential issues?" Get instant score readouts, specific negative metric identification, and intelligent root cause flows.
  • Monitoring:Ask "What's the VPN status and health of my Denver HQ10 network?" Get a snapshot of your network and device status, subnets, VPN peers, and more.
  • Maintenance:Ask "I want to replace switch C9350_15 in my NY01 network with a new switch not assigned to a network. Show me switches available in inventory, and I'll select the one to use for the replacement." Get autonomous workflows that manage the manual process of migrating switch port configurations from an existing to a new switch.
• Multilayered assurance:View everything across owned and unowned networks. From your HQ campus to a remote branch, you can eliminate blind spots, identify root causes, and forecast issues before they impact digital experiences.

Scaling enterprise campus environments

Managing large, distributed enterprise deployments isn't just a scale challenge-it's also an operational one. That's why our platform is purpose-built for high-scale, complex environments.

We're continuing to expand cloud management ease and flexibility for next-gen wireless, switching, and routing in the Meraki dashboard. This includes:

• Wireless:Cisco Campus Gateway (available May 2025), Cisco Wireless 9179F Access Point for stadiums and large venues, which expands our Wi-Fi 7 portfolio (available summer 2025)
• Switching:Cloud management with cloud configuration for Cisco C9350 Series Smart Switches (available August 2025), cloud management with device configuration coming soon for Cisco C9610 Series Smart Switches (available August 2025)
• Routing:Cisco 8000 Series Secure Routers (available June 2025)

For large campus deployments, we're also unlocking powerful switching capabilities:

• Advanced routing:Routed ports, BGP
• High availability:StackWise Virtual, ISSU, RPVST+, VRRP E
• Enhanced macro and microsegmentation:Fabric, VRF Lite
• Advanced controls:Cloud CLI to execute commands directly from a cloud CLI terminal

For on-premises deployments, we're providing more efficient and sustainable network operations from Catalyst Center-giving you insights and scale without complexity.

• Catalyst Center Global Manager:Manage every location across your globally dispersed, multisite networks through a centralized dashboard for greater visibility and operational efficiency. Easily scale to thousands of devices and endpoints. With built-in multilayered assurance, you can proactively resolve issues for minimal downtime and maximum productivity.
• Azure Virtual Appliance:Catalyst Center now supports Azure, enabling flexible deployments on-premises with a physical appliance or VMware ESXi, as well as in public cloud environments like AWS and Azure.
• Energy management:Monitor and optimize energy usage with standardized metrics, such as total energy consumption (kWh), energy consumption by device type, and site-based energy cost and savings.

These added layers of control and flexibility help your teams accomplish more each day, with fewer resources.

AI-powered assurance for end-to-end visibility

At its core, multilayered assurance enables consistently exceptional digital experiences across every domain that supports your business. In today's complex AI era, it's not just about visibility across diverse user environments, it's also about detecting and resolving problems faster and with precision.

Multilayered assurance empowers you to deliver performance, reliability, and trust in every digital interaction. It requires more than data-it demands visibility, intelligence, and the ability to act in context. ThousandEyes is embedded directly into the Meraki dashboard, bringing powerful visibility right where your teams need it, helping to:

• Focus on what matters most:Monitor access, WAN, cloud, and internet wherever users and services connect.
• See and understand every part of the path:From device to app, get hop-by-hop visibility, even across unowned networks.
• Accelerate remediation:With actionable AI-powered insights, instantly identify what's impacting experiences and act quickly.

Say you're getting complaints about Webex team calls dropping from the sales teams. With Cisco AI Assistant, you can confirm the issue, pinpoint the provider outage, and suggest mitigation steps-in seconds.

That's the power of multilayered assurance with Cisco AI Assistant. You get comprehensive visibility into network and app performance, proactive alerts, root cause analysis, and holistic health insights. You're not merely seeing the issue, you're understanding it in full context and resolving anomalies.

What's next: See more, do less

The core idea behind unified management is simple: enable you to get back in control so you can achieve more and do less.

We're helping you shift-from reacting to issues, to predicting future problems and preemptively deploying solutions. From manual operations to agentic workflows. And from playing catch-up to getting ahead with proactive alerts and insights.

That same CIO customer I spoke with last year? He recently told me, "Our team feels like we're getting back in the driver's seat. Instead of chasing problems, we can start anticipating them."

We're committed to making this transformative shift possible for every customer with unified management, AgenticOps intelligence, and multilayered assurance.

Stay tuned as we continue to innovate and expand our platform capabilities to meet you where you are. See our unified platform in action with a free instant demo, and learn more about the Cisco AI Assistant.

Cisco AI Assistant
Multilayered Assurance
Secure Networking