Agentic AI for Business Leaders: Trust, Guardrails and Rollout Lessons from Cisco’s Joe Vaccaro

You need to have it right now. Business leaders don't outsource this to other individuals. Use it yourself. Same thing of you. Go build on a weekend project. When you see the power and you see that unlock, you see the way that you feel when you have that level of agency to go and get things done. You can then understand how to apply that across your business, not only in terms of your employee productivity, but also how do you transform the business processes? How do you transform the way that your operations teams manage your business?

You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory. No fluff. No shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. What's up, Joe? Welcome to Right About Now. Hey, thanks for having me. Joe, good to be with you. Cisco. We've had a lot of Cisco executives. It's good to have another one. Always enjoy. I like opening up, like we talked pre-episode. Cisco is one of these companies in America that makes things happen, but everyone kind of goes, what are they? What do they do? I know it's like computers, right? And I'm like, yeah, it is, but I always like opening up the Vortex, as we called it, Joe. I know you've been there a while.

But the reality is that the business doesn't operate without a network. But the network, what connects a user to an application, what connects Ryan, you and I talking right now is an incredibly complex system. Think of it like orchestra or a supply chain platform. That connects your device there in South Carolina through the Internet to me here in the Bay Area. And that network is getting more complex as we've seen these different fundamental shifts over time. We saw the rise of the Internet replacing traditional networks. We saw the rise of cloud replacing traditional, say, data centers. We saw the rise of SaaS applications replacing cloud. traditional on-premises application. We saw the rise of work from home that were placed maybe in office-based work. We're also seeing the rise of AI and all those major trends have made the network more critical than ever before, but also made it more complex than ever before.

Let's start in the macro and then we'll get micro. Is this bigger than the internet? Is it bigger than, I wouldn't say power. Before we had electricity and after, it almost feels that big a scale to me, but sometimes I'm living in a bubble. Talk to me, Joe, about perspective of what AI is on a broad scale. When you look back and if you study history and you think about the great industrial revolutions, whether it was factories and others, and you can think of the Internet as part of that industrial revolution. It changed the economy from every single way for not only how do we do business, but how business gets done. And now if you think about this next big wave in AI, it's feeling like it's having the same impacts on business.

The same way if you go back to the early 2000s and the rise of that Internet economy. Now we're in this AI era. And it's impacting businesses in a variety of different ways. It's one, as we see AI being infused across the business, it's changing about how business gets done. But then also it becomes this massive productivity change when we think about how do we empower our employees to leverage AI to be able to help them get their work done faster, but also help them to be able to focus their time where their own judgment can be best applied, you know, where they're. craft and where their judgment is maybe they lack the time to be able to go and focus on those core problems because they're constantly chasing the kind of the reactive nature of firefighting in their business.

I missed my TI-83 graphing calculator, man. That thing was amazing. Oh, you can play. Remember the games you could play on that thing? Oh, yeah. Playing Snake when I'm supposed to be paying attention in class. That takes me back. I'm glad I wasn't the only one.

It was like, hey, how many R's are there in Strawberry? And now if you think about we're in 2026 and the advanced capabilities, in many ways, it's not fear, but it's like, how do you keep up with it? How do you harness these capabilities? Knowing that in business, your competitors are also using these capabilities to create a strategic advantage. And so for business, it's how you embrace it, how do you unlock it, and how do you do it in a way that also brings your employees along for that ride. And all of this has happened over a short period of time. And I think that's where it creates a level of anxiety that business leaders are having to kind of dealt with to say, okay, how do I apply this smartly across my organization?

businesses. Apple, Samsung, Verizon, Audi, Lexus, Toyota. Some of the biggest brands in the world. They move slow as shit, man. I mean, I'm just being honest. This is how it used to be. It's been a few years. How is Cisco and how are you seeing companies like embrace this when traditionally corporate America is timid for a reason? But now how are we embracing this? If you think about it, Cisco, we're building the critical infrastructure for the AI era. How do we do that for our customers? Well, it starts by doing it ourselves. From a Cisco IT perspective, we've really been, and I give a lot of credit to our team, has been the cutting edge of unlocking these capabilities for our employees to use themselves.

Because when you use it yourselves, you understand the power of it, and then you can think about how do I apply this back to solving those complex customer problems. We've also rolled out AI agents for all 90,000 employees within Cisco companies. That really helps them to see the power of it and then to live on that edge of creativity for how to then apply it back to the problem. Now, one of the points you made also, I think, is around, you know, hey, guardrails. And I think that kind of hits on a key point around trust. How do you build trust in the systems? Because at the end of the day, I also remind myself that Cisco isn't in the business of creating networks. We're in the business of keeping a hospital operational so that the doctors can serve their patients.

Yeah. The keys are the news can shape your perspective. And again, the way to build an understanding is to use the products and to live at the edge. So if you go back to, say, Anthropic, when they were coming out with Mythos, Cisco is one of the leading partners for Anthropic. We were there from the very beginning in Project Glasswing in leveraging these models to understand how security threats could be exploited across a business. We used the mythos internally across our own infrastructure. We used it to improve our own products and then based upon those learnings, helped to understand how we could then apply these methods in terms of hardening our own products and enabling our customers to be able to protect themselves. themselves. For me, it's easy to look at the headlines and to form opinions.

We've seen in terms of building AI capabilities where if you give an agent a goal, it will use every possible means to try to achieve that goal. And that's where you think about how do you build software technology and running through evals and guardrails and testing it. But yeah, absolutely. If you give agents goals, they can be able to work. You know, there was a quote, I don't know who it's attributed to, which talked about, you should think about agents as teenagers. They're extremely confident and eager, but at times lack good judgment. And so when you're bringing agents into your system, I think that's where you need to build up the trust. You need to provide a way to govern the actions so that if there are taking steps alongside your operations teams in making changes to critical infrastructure,

not nuclear codes by any means, but helping to fix problems across your network, they're doing so with a level of determinism and not necessarily kind of making it up on the spot. So that kind of framing that analogy kind of helped me kind of shape how we think about agents and also how customers should think about how do you bring agents into your business processes safely.

But in all seriousness, I do put down my LLM quite a bit. Think about it like how Hiring a new engineer or a new college graduate, they don't work well with nuance. You need to give them clear, direct feedback. They work better if you yell at them or not. I don't know how to go and run that eval system, but I do know at times what they work best with is giving them clear, succinct feedback. When you leave ambiguity in your answers, they can interpret that and run a mess. So what you're hitting at is when you're working with Claude or you're working with Codex, others, as direct as possible in terms of what you're after, what is your objective, will give the agent a better chance of achieving it.

It's like the world's greatest, smartest toddler. Oh, my God. It's a genius. But, man, it's an idiot sometimes. It's exactly what you said. At the same point, what I see is that the agents are getting incredibly intelligent. The way that intelligence is formed is not only through memory, but the context that you provide it. If you think about that shared context layer, especially tying it back to a little bit from a Cisco, right? agents as teammates across your critical infrastructure, you want them to have the context of what's happening. So if they do propose changes, they understand the impacts of that. And so a lot of what we think about is how do we enable agents to have the broadest deepest understanding of context to what's happening across the networks and how other domains, whether that's your security policy or others that are impacting it, so that when they do make recommendations, they do it with the best possible understanding of the entire end-to-end system.

But talk about cost of AI and the power to do all of these things. Is that going to get better over time? It's gotten better in some ways, but then, like you said, the smarter agents are opening 17 other helpers. And I'm like, shit, I mean, it was going to save some money until you got lazy and you need 17 helpers. First off, your Dave & Buster still has regular tokens. Like mine only has a credit card, and my kids burn through that in like five minutes because they don't even know how much money's left. And so I got to go to your Dave & Buster's. No, it's that too. Figurative tokens.

And from a Cisco perspective, we've been thinking about this. Again, as a 90,000 person company, our budget for tokens is pretty significant. And so as we think about how this then impacts our own customers, that's why we've invested in building, training our own model that's specific to understanding network intelligence. And as our customers use Cisco products, it automatically selects. A Cisco model for certain questions leverages frontier models for other questions. And then what you'll see, right, is that technology will allow you to be able to then use this kind of ensemble of different models to help you to optimize based upon the question at hand. What I would encourage people to do is, you know, costs are very real. But again, we're at the early stages of how do we think about the impact of AI across our business.

in that we're just starting this era of token efficiency where the intelligence layer and model routing is being built into products to be able to select the right model. And what we'll see also is that over time, small language models that get put directly onto the hardware in devices where you're not even exercising a frontier model from a token cost, and you can do that fully in-house on the device itself. That's going to be an amazing unlock. I still firmly believe that the cost equation will work itself across the business over time. And the businesses that win are going to be the ones that continue to lean into understanding and how to best use the technology to kind of further their business objectives and create the differentiation in the market.

Now, the question is, when should businesses go down that path? Part of it is that do you sit on data that becomes part of your own differentiation as a business? And if you do, then there's a key unlock that could be had to be able to then leverage that in specialized ways. So instead of using a general purpose LLM at a frontier, your customers are able to leverage a model that is highly tuned and highly trained on a particular class of problems that you have the keys. Right. In the case of Cisco, we have the largest set of telemetry and understanding of how networks operate. And creating that value as an unlock for our customers is a strategic advantage. Right. in our own business, my advice would be if you have that in your business, then it becomes a key unlock.

How does Cisco feel and position that or think about that? I I've seen other customers, their businesses, begin to operationalize the interfaces into their intelligence. If I were to give you advice, Ryan, I'd say, hey, if people are after your intelligence, then create the interface so that they can do it. It becomes a part of your differentiation. So you could create a model context protocol interface so that if agents do want to pull all of your podcasts and all of the intelligence that they do so in a structured way and from that semantic layer that unlocks it. And it's really an extension of the reach that you could have as a business. And I've seen other customers, including ThousandEyes and Cisco at large, do that, where we say, OK, look, we've always had an API for how people could get access to our underlying telemetry.

And we've got almost 700 episodes of business knowledge. And you can come search keywords in business and making it really easy to get to that. That's a little bit of what you're talking about. So that I definitely believe in. I guess it's more the monitoring, you know, building APIs and different things. If you have broader data that has value in a way that it has to be synthesized, but the data itself still has value on its own because it's historical and that sort of thing. Because, I mean, a lot of people sell access to data. I think that was more the context of the question. Does that make sense? It does. The AI economy is still in its early infancy. Whether it's Cisco or any business, we have to continue to really lean into the creativity as these business models are going to change and know that, to kind of quote the famous line, the only the paranoid survive.

Use it yourself. Same thing with you. Go build on a weekend project. When you see the power and you see that unlock, you see the way that you feel when you have that level of agency to go and get things done. You can then understand how to apply that across your business, not only in terms of your employee productivity, but also how do you transform the business processes? How do you transform the way that your operations teams manage your business? That's, for me, has been one of the key things is to use it myself because then I know and understand where to best apply it in terms of how I can build better products and how I can be able to kind of reshape my own organization.

Easy to find us on the web. I'm on socials at x at Joe Vaccaro. And you can also find me at LinkedIn at Joe Vaccaro as well. Easy to find. Joe, we really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thanks for having me again. This was a lot of fun. Hey guys, you know, to find us, Ryan is right.com. You'll find the entire episode, highlight clips, links to Cisco. They've been a great partner, bringing us great executives and guests like Joe. We appreciate them for helping change the world. And we appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time on Write About Now. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea.

Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram, at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at ryanisright.com. This is Right About Now. Now quit waiting. Go win.