26 years around production networks. Omdia's Jim Frey nailed it: compute is cattle, disposable. Networks are pets, one switch breaks and the blast radius is the building. You do not hand the keys to the pet to something with no fear of consequence.
But Dell'Oro's Sanchez has the realistic near-term: not autonomy, supervised remediation and better evidence. The winners define the boundaries the agent runs inside.
What change would you let an agent make unattended, and which never?
Newest: CVE-2026-20245, June 4, authenticated command injection in Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, root via crafted file upload, reported by Mandiant, exploited in the wild. It chains: CVE-2026-20182 (CVSS 10.0) to netadmin, then 20245 to root.
The Manager sits at the management plane, so root there pushes config to every edge device. Treat it as public-facing, because the people chaining these already do.
When did you last audit it like a crown-jewel target?
Arista raised its 2026 AI networking target to 3.5B dollars, FY guide near 11.5B, and leads the DC Ethernet switch market. The bet that hyperscalers pick Ethernet over InfiniBand paid off.
Model-training traffic, all-reduce and all-gather, overwhelms three-hop leaf-spine. Fabrics are going single-hop, RAIL-optimized, RoCEv2. The layer that pays moved.
Is RoCEv2 on your learning list yet?
Cloud Control launched at Cisco Live, agent harness built on MCP. Meanwhile OX Security found an RCE pattern across the MCP SDKs, 150M-plus downloads affected. Censys counted 12,520 reachable MCP services. Around 40 percent have no auth.
Five Eyes guidance, May 1: assume agentic systems will misbehave, prioritize reversibility over efficiency. The agent is not the risk. The unauthenticated tool it can call is.
Do you have one exposed?
Cisco published the CCNA v2.0 blueprint on May 20. First real overhaul since 2020. Over 20 percent changed. New fourth pillar: the role of AI in network management. The CCIE is getting an AI module too.
The expert track no longer means expert at configuring devices. It means expert at directing the automation that configures them.
If your CCNA is from 2022, what is your refresh plan?
John Capobianco of Itential said it cleanest: LLMs are probabilistic and infrastructure is not. A probabilistic model improvising on a network with no source of truth is not automation. It is a faster outage.
Source of truth first. Deterministic guardrails. The agent reasons, executes inside your boundaries. The winners of the next two years know which config the agent should never touch.
What is the one task you would never hand an agent?
Cisco raised its AI infrastructure order target to $9B, up from $5B. And cut under 4,000 roles. Record demand for AI networking, fewer people to run it. That is the trade.
AgenticOps has a $9B order book behind it. The question is no longer whether AI runs your network, but what you let it run unattended.
What is the first change you would trust an agent to make, and the first you never will?
