How Cisco Is Preparing for an Agentic Workforce

What this episode covers

“Your next employee might not be human… and your security strategy isn’t ready for it.”At RSAC, I spoke to Tom Gillis, SVP & GM of Infrastructure & Security Group at Cisco on The Ravit Show, and the conversation quickly moved beyond the usual AI hype into something much more real. We talked about agentic AI not just as a tool, but as a system that can act on its own, make decisions, and operate across enterprise data. That shift is forcing a complete rethink of security, because traditional models were built around humans, not autonomous agents. One thing that stood out was how security teams have always played it safe, often defaulting to “no,” but with agentic AI, that mindset becomes a bottleneck. The real challenge now is enabling this new layer of intelligence without losing control.We also unpacked what it really means to secure an “agentic workforce.” If every employee starts running multiple AI agents, each acting independently, the attack surface grows overnight. So do we start treating these agents like endpoints? Do they need identities, permissions, and governance just like humans? And if that’s the case, how do SOC teams even deal with the explosion of alerts and signals? What I found interesting is that this is not some distant future problem, it is already showing up, and companies like Cisco are actively working through how to design security systems that can keep up.This conversation made one thing very clear to me. The AI conversation is no longer about models or capabilities. It is about control, trust, and how we rethink security for a world where humans are no longer the only actors inside the enterprise.#data #ai #rsac #cisco #theravitshow

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