By Brian Buntz
Publication Date: 2026-02-27 18:38:00
There is a strange recursion happening across the technology landscape right now. Engineers are doing research and development on AI agents whose ultimate job is to do research and development. At Cisco, networking specialists are building autonomous systems that can monitor, troubleshoot and eventually manage the same infrastructure those specialists maintain today. The work is R&D in the truest sense: experimental, iterative and uncertain, aimed at producing tools that will reshape the work itself.
Edwards, a vice president of product management who oversees the company’s enterprise campus switching portfolio, described a field at an inflection point. “You have this existing way of running networks and an existing way of trying to achieve business outcomes, and that’s evolved, you know, over the course of the last couple decades,” he said. New workplace patterns, the acceleration of AI, and a growing security burden are converging at the same time, he argued, creating an…
