The Enterprise Reality
At our customer event on the day of the announcement an architect at a large critical infrastructure provider shared their simple view of what they heard: “I look to NetBrain to diagnose and automate my end-to-end network. I look to Cisco to manage the details of my estate. This partnership gives me a view to how these two worlds can work together.”
The bi-directional nature of the AI Canvas architecture means investigations, actions, and post-mortems can flow to the agent or tool best positioned to serve them – whether the entry point is AI Canvas reaching into NetBrain for topology, path context, or automation, or changes initiated by NetBrain flowing back through AI Canvas to stay synchronized with the entire Cisco estate.
The ecosystem-first storytelling is a big signal, but there is a lot of work to do to turn that promise into operational reality, particularly while honoring the sophistication trade-off.
But the time is now. According to Shamus McGillicuddy’s recent EMA Megatrends report, only 31% of network teams describe their strategy as completely successful, down from 42% two years ago. For network teams facing a wave of new demands, that trend must be reversed.
What It Takes to Get There
For agents to reason and invoke automation reliably, they need trusted network context and clear guardrails. We believe context must include the current, cross-vendor understanding of the full environment: control plane topology, path (including application path), and intent in the form of state and configuration. Agent investigations and decisions must have the right information forming their conclusions.
This is where the gap lives in most enterprise environments. Cisco Cloud Control can execute within its unified plane. But the agentic loop — sense, diagnose, remediate, validate, deploy — requires context about what the network looks like right now, across every vendor in the path. For most enterprises, that extends across multiple vendors and cloud. An agent that can only see the Cisco segments of a multivendor environment will remediate confidently within its field of view and miss the root cause sitting one hop outside it.
NetBrain provides Cisco Cloud Control with both the verified context of the full network and the automation tools to drive change, whether planned or as part of a diagnosis and remediation fire drill. The network context layer: topology mapped, paths traced, intent documented, configuration state current. That context is what makes agentic remediation trustworthy rather than just fast. The agents operating in that loop do so within the operational boundaries your team defines.
Use Cases Worth Pursuing
Here are just a few of the conversations we had at Cisco Live that we believe can drive real change:
- Full network diagnosis triggered from ServiceNow to quickly isolate and identify root cause (this was the #1 demo request).
- Bringing cross-domain validation to change control – pre- and post- checks.
- Faster time to remediate CVEs alongside the automation to assess and validate ongoing compliance.
- Sharing network context within AI Canvas to allow cross-domain teams to validate network performance during diagnosis/triage or pre- and post-change.
- Validation of the network’s role (or not!) in reported application slowness by connecting APM and network data for a true path-level understanding of the user’s experience all the way to individual network node behavior (this was my personal favorite)
- And many more. I like the list of ideas being framed out in the latest Gartner report, the Market Guide to Agentic NetOps.
These conversations were not solely about announcements at Cisco Live, although there is real optimism brewing for NetOps professionals. The biggest vendor in the room shining a light on the space created a buzz. The signal included a clear openness to the broader ecosystem (hats off to the Cisco team for their bold and open stance). But the underlying driver is the broader adoption of Agentic NetOps – charting a path that allows automation to progressively take on the burden facing network teams.
NetBrain announced a great set of agentic capabilities last week. We announced our inclusion in the Cloud Control Ecosystem. And there’s more to announce at NetBrain Live in September – join us. Ultimately, these are in service of our customers’ unique strategy. We believe that beginning and building your path to Agentic NetOps will reverse the skeptical trend voiced in the EMA report.
The Question Every Director Left With
Many network professionals left Cisco Live 2026 with optimism. They also left with practical questions. “Given the actual network I am responsible for, which for most includes multiple vendors, integrations, tool sprawl, and knowledge locked in senior engineers’ heads, what does my path look like?”
That question does not have a keynote answer. It has a network-by-network answer. We have seen that the readiness to adopt and drive automation and Agentic NetOps varies across teams and across diagnosis and remediation or change management or assessment. The only wrong answer is not getting started.
The path forward and the real work ahead are not in tension. They’re the same thing.
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by Jun 9, 2026