https://blogs.cisco.com/innovation/network-operations-for-the-ai-age
The Complexity Cliff
Before your first meeting of the day, the alerts have already started. A branch office in Europe is syncing with a cloud service in Virginia. A policy drift is flagged in SecOps. Somewhere, an engineer is pulling up a dashboard—again. And AI is everywhere: in headlines, in workflows, on every screen.
Today’s IT isn’t just busy. It’s overrun. The IT stack is sprawling with apps running across clouds, edges, and everything in between. AI workloads are exploding. Machines are talking to machines. And the expectation? Zero downtime. Always-on. Machine speed.
Even worse, the signal-to-noise ratio is deteriorating by the minute. IT teams now face over 170,000 network alerts per hour. And with AI, that number is expected to triple. Meanwhile, AI agents expect sub-50 millisecond response times, faster than humans can blink. By 2026, nearly two-thirds of organizations will face a critical IT skills gap.
With AI systems running 24×7, IT has no off hours. This isn’t just a staffing problem—it’s an architecture problem.
That’s why Cisco is behind AgenticOps, a foundational shift for how operations function in an AI-driven world.
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