Cisco wants partners to lead with resilient infrastructure services, and the company is pitching @Cisco IQ and Cloud Control as AI-powered tools to help identify risks or outdated gear in customer environments and help these businesses modernize. For partners, it’s a three-step play: uncover the risk, modernize operations, and deploy AI agents that act instead of just alerting, according to Liz Centoni, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief customer experience officer. The new capabilities will automate more tasks and help teams work together faster, according to the tech giant. @GeeNarcisi has the details, including from @jpatel41, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, and partner perspective from Faisal Bhutto, president and CEO of managed service provider (MSP) Alykas, and Lane Irvine, director of strategic alliances for @LongViewSystems: @CiscoPartners #CiscoPS26#

Cisco Aguilar (@CiscoForNevada), Nevada's Secretary of State, explains why he refused to hand over Nevada voters' personal data to the federal government on a new episode of #TheBraveTechnologist#. Watch the full episode, hosted by @LukeMulks, here:

Cisco CEO @ChuckRobbins said the tech giant’s focus on AI, services and resilient infrastructure represents a significant opportunity for partners to build more profitable, recurring revenue practices, while also capitalizing on a massive technology refresh cycle. And the opportunities couldn't come at a better time, because these big transitions are making @Cisco’s partner ecosystem more important than ever, according to Robbins. In an exclusive interview with @CRN Associate Managing Editor @GeeNarcisi at Cisco Partner Summit 2026, Robbins discussed: - How the recently revamped Cisco 360 program is rewarding partners for their capabilities and customer value - Why Cisco IQ and @splunk could expand the services opportunity - How partners can help customers modernize aging infrastructure despite budget, staffing and operational constraints - The competitive advantage he believes Cisco’s networking, security, silicon, optics and observability portfolio gives partners as customers ready themselves for an agentic AI future Here’s what Robbins had to say about partner profitability in an AI world, Splunk and the capabilities that will define the successful Cisco partner of the future: @CiscoPartners #CiscoPS26#

Cisco warns of hackers exploiting a firewall vulnerability Cisco has released security patches for a vulnerability in its ASA and Firepower firewalls that hackers are already exploiting. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-76418, has a severity score of 8.6/10. Attackers can exploit it without logging in, potentially forcing affected firewalls to restart and disrupting VPN connections.

Cisco President Jeetu Patel (@jpatel41) expects 30 to 40% of people to be using AI agents seriously within 15 months, up from under 2% today. Full session from our AI Assurance & Governance Summit at Stanford: 0:00 Agents are like teenagers 3:23 Personal agents are the second ChatGPT moment 4:23 Agent tokens passed human tokens in February 8:49 Best case, worst case 10:54 His answer to Dario's "pacing the frontier" 16:27 Every Cisco manager gets a token budget 17:17 His 15-year-old's AI-built startup 21:48 Are we in an AI bubble? 27:32 Speed is the moat 31:29 "We have only sold fear"

Cisco President Jeetu Patel (@jpatel41) says AI agents act like teenagers: "These agents tend to be, you know, like teenagers. They're supremely intelligent, they tend to not have any fear of consequence, and they exercise poor judgment far more frequently than you and I would like." "The distinction between knowing when an agent is being adversarially attacked by an external bad actor versus an agent is in fact exercising poor judgment because they think they're following your order very literally is going to be harder and harder to tell apart." - Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco, at our AI Assurance & Governance Summit at Stanford on October 1.