Cisco Wants to Power the AI Future: Jeetu Patel Unveils Bold Strategy at Splunk 2025 in Boston

September 10, 2025 – Boston

On Monday, September 8, 2025, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel took the stage at Splunk’s annual conference in Boston. He delivered a powerful message: Cisco aims to be the critical infrastructure for the AI era.

Patel explained that artificial intelligence is moving into a new phase. This is not just about chatbots answering questions. The future is about AI agents—smart systems that act on their own, work on behalf of people, and solve problems with little supervision. He said the shift will be so massive that the skills of 8 billion humans could soon feel like the work of 80 billion.

Cisco’s strategy is bold: build the networks, data platforms, and trust systems that will allow AI to truly scale.

The Three Roadblocks Holding AI Back

Patel reminded the audience that AI, despite its excitement, faces serious barriers. He highlighted three main challenges:

1. Infrastructure bottleneck
   AI requires enormous computing power and very fast networks. Current infrastructure cannot keep up with demand. Energy use is also becoming a concern. Without solving this, AI cannot grow at the pace businesses and society expect.
2. Lack of trust
   Many AI systems today work like a black box. People don’t always know how they reach their answers. This makes it hard for businesses and governments to fully rely on AI. Patel argued that trust must be built into AI systems from the ground up.
3. The data gap
   Today’s large AI models are trained mostly on human-made data such as books, text, images, or video. But Patel said this ignores a huge goldmine—machine-generated data. This includes logs, metrics, and traces that computers and devices constantly produce. If tapped properly, this data could fuel the next stage of AI growth.

Cisco’s Big Bet: The Data Fabric

To tackle these issues, Cisco announced its newest innovation: the Cisco Data Fabric.

This is a new platform built on Splunk technology, designed specifically for handling machine data at scale. The goal is simple: turn raw streams of machine data into AI-ready intelligence.

Key Features of Cisco Data Fabric:

• Lower cost and easier data handling – Businesses will spend less and manage more data without heavy complexity.
• AI-ready pipelines – Data is prepared to train custom AI models, build AI agents, and connect with business insights.
• Time Series Foundation Model – A special model focused on time-based machine data. It can detect anomalies, forecast issues, and explain root causes. Cisco will open-source this model in November 2025 on Hugging Face.
• Federated architecture – Companies don’t need to move data from where it lives. Cisco Data Fabric works directly with Amazon S3, Snowflake, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Azure, and more.
• Splunk Machine Data Lake + AI Toolkit – Together, these provide a permanent base for analytics and AI training.

Patel described the platform as “the fastest, most secure path from data to action.”

New AI Tools to Support Businesses

Alongside Data Fabric, Cisco also introduced a series of tools designed to help teams adopt AI faster:

• Cisco AI Canvas: An AI agent inside Splunk Cloud that helps teams collaborate. It allows users to ask natural-language questions and get insights in real time.
• Splunk Federated Search for Snowflake: Launching in February 2026, this feature lets companies blend operational data from Splunk with business data in Snowflake.
• Free Cisco firewall data integration: By adding firewall data into Splunk at no cost, Cisco wants to give businesses stronger visibility into their security.
• AI Agents for Observability: Previewed on September 9, 2025, these agents automatically collect telemetry, detect system issues, find root causes, and apply fixes. This could reduce downtime and improve IT efficiency dramatically.

Cisco + Splunk: Stronger Together

Cisco acquired Splunk in 2023 for $28 billion. At that time, critics feared Cisco might smother Splunk’s innovative culture. But Patel used the stage to reassure customers. He emphasized that Cisco is not slowing Splunk down—it is supercharging it.

He described Splunk as the “machine data fabric for the AI era”, central to Cisco’s new vision. The partnership brings together Cisco’s massive network infrastructure and Splunk’s unmatched ability to manage data at scale.

How Cisco Sees the Future of AI

Patel spoke with optimism about how AI will reshape the world. He compared today’s moment to the early days of electricity or the internet. Just as those technologies created entirely new industries, AI will create opportunities we cannot yet imagine.

But he also stressed caution. Without trusted infrastructure, AI’s growth could cause harm. Patel said Cisco’s role will be to build a strong, secure, and open foundation that allows AI to grow responsibly.

Analysts React

Industry experts responded positively. IDC analyst Archana Venkatraman called Cisco’s Data Fabric a “game-changer”. She explained that many businesses today struggle to make sense of massive machine-data streams. Cisco’s architecture offers a unified and real-time way to solve that pain point.

Others noted that Cisco is entering a highly competitive space. Giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all pushing their own AI platforms. But Cisco’s advantage, according to experts, is its deep control of global networking infrastructure. Since AI depends on fast and secure networks, Cisco may have a natural edge.

What This Means for Businesses

For companies, Cisco’s announcements could mean:

• Reduced cost and complexity in handling machine data.
• Better security and visibility by combining network and firewall data with Splunk’s monitoring tools.
• AI agents that reduce manual work, saving time for IT and operations teams.
• Faster time to action, since data doesn’t need to be moved across platforms.

In short, Cisco is positioning itself not just as a tech provider but as a central nervous system for enterprise AI.

Conclusion

The event at Splunk 2025 in Boston was more than a product launch. It was Cisco’s declaration of intent. Under Jeetu Patel’s leadership, Cisco wants to be the critical infrastructure for the AI era.

By addressing infrastructure limits, trust gaps, and the underuse of machine data, Cisco hopes to unlock the true potential of artificial intelligence. With Splunk at its side, it is building the tools businesses will need to thrive in a world run by AI agents.

As Patel summed it up on stage: the AI era is coming fast, and Cisco intends to build the foundation that makes it work.