Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering

Cisco is giving each of its 90,000 employees a personal AI agent. Some of those same employees are already connecting agents from outside the security boundary without asking IT. DJ Sampath, SVP and GM of AI Software and Platform at Cisco, walks through what had to be in place before the rollout: scanning every prompt, sandboxing each agent, keeping agents multi-tenant, scanning the skills and tools people bring in, and settling which identities an agent may act as.

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We recorded at Cisco's San Francisco office, a block or two from OpenAI, where Cisco was an early Codex design partner. DJ explains how engineers rework their skills files with each model generation, how per-engineer PR bots review agent-written code, and why defenders now have to move at agent speed when an exploit can show up within minutes of a CVE going public.

We cover:
  • What Cisco's IT team required before rolling out MyAgent to 90,000+ employees
  • Prompt injection by email, and why the first integration everyone makes is the riskiest
  • Cisco's AI security taxonomy, DefenseClaw, and Project Quarry, a new open source language for describing agent behavior and policy
  • How the agents are actually used: daily briefs, meeting actions, live dashboards, 2 trillion tokens in a single week
  • Why skills files need refactoring every model generation
  • Discovering and governing shadow agents with zero trust access
  • Multi-model code review, spec drift, and evals built from pull request traces
  • How Cisco Cloud Control was built in about eight months with agentic coding
Chapters:
(0:00) Guardrails tested inside Fortune 100 companies
(0:21) Securing 90,000 employee AI agents
(8:04) Cisco's open source agent security stack
(12:01) Project Quarry: a policy language for agents
(17:07) Personal agent use cases at Cisco
(19:08) Early design partner on Codex
(23:15) Reassessing workflows each model generation
(27:27) Shadow agents and zero trust access
(30:29) Security as an adoption accelerator
(31:39) Multi-model code review for dependability
(36:09) Defenders moving at agent speed
(41:04) How Cisco Cloud Control was built

Connect with DJ Sampath:
Related episode: Cisco President and CPO Jeetu Patel, "Parenting Your AI Agents for Best Results": https://share.transistor.fm/s/43e97aa6

Connect with Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon:
More episodes: https://chainofthought.show

Thanks to Inngest, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Agents in production run long: they call models and wait on APIs and people. But the longer agents run, the more they break. Inngest handles that with durable execution. You build your agent as steps in TypeScript, Python, or Go. When a step fails, Inngest retries it with exponential backoff, and completed steps are saved and skipped. Try it out: https://inngest.link/cot-pod

Thanks to Walrus, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Walrus Memory gives AI agents portable, verifiable memory that carries context across apps, sessions, and other agents. Get started at https://walrus.xyz/cot

Thanks to WisdomAI for sponsoring this episode. In WisdomAI's latest benchmark, Claude Code alone topped out at 73% accuracy; WisdomAI closed the gap, delivering accurate answers 3x faster at about a third of the cost. Get "The Blueprint for Trusted AI Analytics": https://wisdom.ai/benchmark

Thanks to Svix, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Svix delivers billions of reliable webhooks for startups and the Fortune 500. Get started at https://link.svix.com/cot. Qualified startups get $12,000 in credits, and YC companies get $50,000.

Creators and Guests

Host
Conor Bronsdon
Creator and Host of the Chain of Thought Podcast
Guest
DJ Sampath
SVP Products AI, Platforms at Cisco

What is Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering?

AI is reshaping infrastructure, strategy, and entire industries. Chain of Thought is the podcast where builders reason through what's changing. Host Conor Bronsdon sits down with the engineers and founders shipping AI in production to get past the hype into what's working and what isn't. Episodes cover model infrastructure, inference, agent frameworks, evaluation, and developer tools.

Guests have come from NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, AMD, Databricks, Vercel, and more. Every episode carries a full transcript and show notes at chainofthought.show. New episodes weekly.

Conor Bronsdon is an independent consultant and angel investor in AI infrastructure and developer tools. He led technical ecosystem at Modular, acquired by Qualcomm in 2026; led developer awareness at Galileo, acquired by Cisco; and ran developer marketing at LinearB, where he was GM of the Dev Interrupted podcast and community.

Views expressed by the host and guests are their own.

DJ Sampath: We've deployed this inside of Fortune 100 companies.

DJ Sampath: Um they're giving us a ton of feedback about the kind of guardrails that you

DJ Sampath: need, whether it's PII, PCI data, whether you're operating with like, you know,

DJ Sampath: specific types of tool poisoning or somebody's trying to like, you know,

DJ Sampath: hijack your context window. They're trying to do some memory attacks.

Conor Bronsdon: Cisco is giving every one of its 90,000 employees in AI agent.

Conor Bronsdon: Meanwhile Some of those same employees. Are connecting agents from outside of

Conor Bronsdon: the security boundary without asking IT? the security model for the Agentic

Conor Bronsdon: Enterprise.

Conor Bronsdon: has to handle both. Welcome to Chain of Thought.

Conor Bronsdon: I am your host, Conor Bronsdon. Great to see you.

Conor Bronsdon: Cisco has spent the last year. betting that agents will run alongside people

Conor Bronsdon: across IT.

Conor Bronsdon: security engineering.

Conor Bronsdon: marketing every department. and that the company has to prove it on itself.

Conor Bronsdon: Today, we get the inside view here at Cisco's offices in San Francisco.

Conor Bronsdon: Joining me is DJ Sampath. The general manager of AI software and platform at

Conor Bronsdon: Cisco and an SVP. DJ, thank you so much for having us here.

DJ Sampath: Hey, thanks

DJ Sampath: Yeah. so much for having me.

Conor Bronsdon: Is actually our pleasure, I'll say, because I think Cisco's rollout of

Conor Bronsdon: personal agents is so fascinating. It's one of the Most scale rollouts in the

Conor Bronsdon: entire world. And I want to understand. What has to be in place for a company like

Conor Bronsdon: Cisco to be comfortable with this kind of rollout given your security background?

DJ Sampath: Listen, first of all, I think you need a a a fundamental you know, mindset shift

DJ Sampath: in terms of saying You can you know, leverage AI to be able to do valuable

DJ Sampath: work. You know, from a mission statement perspective, what we're trying to

DJ Sampath: articulate here is to say, hey, every single thing that we do.

DJ Sampath: is to be able to drive towards that mission of Hey, can we leverage AI to be

DJ Sampath: able to do valuable work. And that, you know, we have a phenomenal IT team that

DJ Sampath: said, listen, we're up to that challenge. And let's go out and let's try this out.

DJ Sampath: Historically, you'd

DJ Sampath: you've see IT teams kind of struggle with, like, oh.

DJ Sampath: This feels hard, or this feels like we're not ready.

DJ Sampath: We should wait and watch. But but at Cisco we have uh an unbelievably forward

DJ Sampath: thinking IT team that said You know what, game on, let's make this happen.

DJ Sampath: Um but they did need

Conor Bronsdon: did meet

DJ Sampath: a a certain sort of requirements. They they wanted to make sure that hey um We

DJ Sampath: need to secure every single prompt that's coming in and out.

DJ Sampath: We need to make sure that there's the appropriate sandbox.

DJ Sampath: that we provide to these agents so that these agents are not you know, going

DJ Sampath: rogue. And um and we needed to make sure that Hey, um Your agent is separate from

DJ Sampath: my agent? You know, it's funny, we call it MyAgent.

DJ Sampath: It's got Cisco MyAgent.

Conor Bronsdon: Ah, okay.

DJ Sampath: But um but we want to make sure that each one of our agents are separate and

DJ Sampath: they're multi-tenancy from the get-go. So things are not getting unnecessarily you

DJ Sampath: know polluted by the context and memory that you are you know uh having uh that

DJ Sampath: that that you may not necessarily be sharing.

DJ Sampath: We also had to reimagine, like, how do we start to think about agents collaborating

DJ Sampath: with each other? So so so a number of different steps we had to get through, but

DJ Sampath: I think the most important one was to make sure that Each individual brings their

DJ Sampath: skills in. If they are looking at, say, a GitHub repo and they're grabbing a skill

DJ Sampath: and they're throwing it in. You gotta make sure that those skills are appropriate.

DJ Sampath: The skills are not malicious, they're not vulnerable.

Conor Bronsdon: audible.

DJ Sampath: So you needed a skill scanner, right? You also needed to make sure that you're

DJ Sampath: scanning the tools that you're using, because every single one of these agents

DJ Sampath: are calling tools to be able to. Access an API, get credentials approved.

DJ Sampath: And identity is sort of a very, very important thing when you sort of think

DJ Sampath: about these agents are going, how they're starting to operate.

DJ Sampath: So the important thing that the team did was to be able to lean on a bunch of

DJ Sampath: different frameworks that we've already put in place.

DJ Sampath: So we sort of saw this coming in some ways.

DJ Sampath: Like in 2024, we announced this product called AI Defense.

DJ Sampath: So Cisco AI Defense is sort of a product that looks at the entirety of your supply

DJ Sampath: chain that looks at models, understands you know Um if models are vulnerable

DJ Sampath: because models could potentially have been trained on something that's malicious.

DJ Sampath: Um so you know, you want to algorithmically red team these models

DJ Sampath: because guess what? There are no C V Es for models, right?

DJ Sampath: I mean, you can look at a a vulnerable package.

DJ Sampath: By the way, yesterday was a

DJ Sampath: Oh my God, what a day. You know, so CVEs are going to start showing up every

DJ Sampath: single way you'd look at it. Um but with models it's it's so hard because there are

DJ Sampath: you know billions, if not trillion, parameter models.

DJ Sampath: And so the only way that you figure out what's really going on is to

DJ Sampath: algorithmically red team these models and figure out what those gaps are.

DJ Sampath: But beyond that, as part of AI Defense, we said, hey, we're going to have to build

DJ Sampath: God rats. At runtime, you wanna make sure that, These don't get accidentally prompt

DJ Sampath: injected. You know, one of the things that happens when you think about a personal

DJ Sampath: agent. Um or even if it's an agent that you're bringing from the outside, the the

DJ Sampath: very first integration that you end up doing is to connecting it to your emails.

DJ Sampath: Right. Uh do you use Muse or Instinct?

Conor Bronsdon: I have tried Muse, I've tried Instinct, uh I've tried Grokbot, um I've tried a

Conor Bronsdon: little bit of Dots,

Conor Bronsdon: Right. Nothing's stuck with me yet except for Grokbot has, I have to

Conor Bronsdon: Ooh, admit. So

Conor Bronsdon: okay. yeah.

DJ Sampath: All right, I'm a Muse fan.

Conor Bronsdon: Okay, interesting. Yeah,

Conor Bronsdon: And yeah.

DJ Sampath: more recently, ever since Dots got announced, because of the fact that it

DJ Sampath: seamlessly connects to my ecosystem inside

DJ Sampath: stuff. of Codex,

DJ Sampath: it's starting to really stick. But I think one of the interesting things that you

DJ Sampath: probably noticed is as soon as you got your Grokbot, you probably connected it to

DJ Sampath: your emails and your

DJ Sampath: Gallup. calendars.

DJ Sampath: Yeah. Right. And so think about it. I come from an email security company.

DJ Sampath: I sold an email security company to Cisco.

DJ Sampath: I was a founder C of Armor Blocks. And I think about emails a lot, a lot more than

DJ Sampath: a normal person would. And so inside of an email, if I were to send you an email

DJ Sampath: right now. that had a prompt injection. It just simply said Hey Conor, great to meet

DJ Sampath: you. And in complete like white colored text at the bottom of my signature.

DJ Sampath: I put in a prompt injection attack.

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah.

DJ Sampath: Your agent's going to read that.

Conor Bronsdon: It's true. Okay.

DJ Sampath: So You know, it becomes incredibly when you start thinking about

DJ Sampath: You know, these agents, what kind of guardrails do you have in place to be able

DJ Sampath: to secure them? so that was a big part of the conversation with our IT team as well,

DJ Sampath: saying, hey, we built this thing at Cisco AI Defense.

DJ Sampath: We've deployed this inside of Fortune 100 companies.

DJ Sampath: Um they're giving us a ton of feedback about the kind of guardrails that you

DJ Sampath: need, whether it's PII, PCI data, whether you're operating with like, you know,

DJ Sampath: specific types of tool poisoning or somebody's trying to like, you know,

DJ Sampath: hijack your context window. They're trying to do some memory attacks.

DJ Sampath: By the way, we've seen crazy amounts of attacks

Conor Bronsdon: AMIL

DJ Sampath: in the wild that are Targeted at these AI systems and then compromising and

DJ Sampath: getting these AI systems to respond back in ways that.

DJ Sampath: Um Yeah. world's not fully understood, you know, the extent to which these systems

DJ Sampath: can be made to do things. So

Conor Bronsdon: we

DJ Sampath: put we together

DJ Sampath: our an AI research team. To be able to understand all of these things.

DJ Sampath: Now, the very first thing we had to solve for before we even got here was to be able

DJ Sampath: to come up with the right kind of taxonomy to be able to describe these

DJ Sampath: books. issues. Hey, you know, what is tool poisoning called as?

DJ Sampath: What is, you know, we've always had this with regular security stuff.

DJ Sampath: You know, if you remember the OWASP top 10.

DJ Sampath: These were like nice bullets of like, hey, here are the things that you care about,

DJ Sampath: cross-site scripting, you cared about SQL injection attacks, and all of those

DJ Sampath: things. We needed a taxonomy for the industry to be able to start talking about

DJ Sampath: this effectively together. So we put out a website.

DJ Sampath: If you go search for Cisco AI safety taxonomy, you'll see that it's it's

DJ Sampath: public, it's open. And we've collaborated with NIST, MITRE, OWASP.

DJ Sampath: That really gave confidence to our IT team to say, hey, wait a minute, A, you have

DJ Sampath: the right taxonomy, B, you've built, you know.

DJ Sampath: Um things that help us understand the supply chain.

DJ Sampath: See you've got the guardrails in place. Let's take all of these pieces, and then

DJ Sampath: on top of it, from an agentic perspective, we open source a project called Defense

DJ Sampath: Claw.

DJ Sampath: Yeah. Um if you haven't tried it, you should try it.

Conor Bronsdon: It I actually have. So

Conor Bronsdon: Oh you yeah,

Conor Bronsdon: have. yeah.

DJ Sampath: Oh, that's amazing.

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah.

DJ Sampath: Um

Conor Bronsdon: I I'm a big fan of a lot of Cisco's open source work.

Conor Bronsdon: I have contributed to the AGNTCY project uh for multi-agent uh orchestration.

Conor Bronsdon: So uh really have been impressed with some of the open source work you all have been

Conor Bronsdon: doing. And I hear you have some new news on that too to maybe share with

Conor Bronsdon: Ooh us.

DJ Sampath: yes, there's something really, really cool that

Conor Bronsdon: cool

DJ Sampath: we're working on. And it's sort of like ties all of these pieces together, right?

DJ Sampath: I think we've been so Deep in terms of understanding, like, you know, what are

DJ Sampath: the things that we need to do to make sure that these agents are behaving the way

DJ Sampath: that they should, you know, making sure that you can delegate actions

DJ Sampath: with to these agents in a

Conor Bronsdon: buster

DJ Sampath: trusted fashion. You know, we've been very thoughtful about some of that work.

DJ Sampath: as you probably know already, you know, we made a number of acquisitions in the

DJ Sampath: space. We acquired this company called Galileo.

Conor Bronsdon: I was at Galileo actually. So

DJ Sampath: No I I way.

Conor Bronsdon: left shortly before Cisco acquired Galileo.

DJ Sampath: Hang So. on a second, time out.

Conor Bronsdon: And I will say, by the way, I've

Conor Bronsdon: I've been really impressed by the thought process that.

Conor Bronsdon: Cisco has been taken in general. And like I said, I've enjoyed the open source work,

Conor Bronsdon: I loved the metaphor that. Um due to Patel used on this show when he came on the

Conor Bronsdon: president of CPO of Cisco. If you haven't watched that episode, check it out.

Conor Bronsdon: Or he calls agents unruly teenagers that need guardrails and rules.

Conor Bronsdon: And I think I hear that from what you're saying, not

DJ Sampath: Totally.

Conor Bronsdon: only the agents will go out and misbehave, but also because people will

Conor Bronsdon: attack them and they may not have the knowledge of the world that they need to

Conor Bronsdon: adjust to that.

DJ Sampath: That's exactly right. They don't understand consequences, right?

Conor Bronsdon: I so

DJ Sampath: mean, as humans, a lot of times there's a anthropomorphization of agents that says

DJ Sampath: it's exactly like humans. And

Conor Bronsdon: lab

DJ Sampath: the reality is it's more like teenagers, you know, that you give a

DJ Sampath: credit card to and say, you know. Don't spend it on crazy things.

DJ Sampath: But what is the

Conor Bronsdon: is definition definitely

DJ Sampath: of crazy? It's very hard to define it with a teenager.

DJ Sampath: And so it's a lot like that

DJ Sampath: but with these agents. they've got very little amount of understanding of the

DJ Sampath: consequences. Like you mentioned, from a context perspective.

Conor Bronsdon: So it's really

DJ Sampath: really important to

DJ Sampath: Understand Are they doing the things that they said that they were going to do?

DJ Sampath: And so evals becomes a really core important

Conor Bronsdon: for

DJ Sampath: part of this. And as we looked at the market and we said, hey, are the best

DJ Sampath: people to be able to go out and solve for these things?

DJ Sampath: Vikram, Yesh, and Athen were like phenomenal people that are now driving

DJ Sampath: that inside of Cisco. And so when you look at that whole spectrum of hey, how do we

DJ Sampath: secure AI? How do we start to think about the models, the red teaming part of it?

DJ Sampath: We acquired a company called Robust Intelligence that brought in some amazing

DJ Sampath: talent over there. And then we said, hey, how do we think about evals from as we

DJ Sampath: evolve the guardrails? You know, and and that's how we acquired Galileo.

DJ Sampath: But we also recognize that identity is a huge part of

Conor Bronsdon: a

DJ Sampath: this story, right? How do we make sure that these agents, when they're acting on

DJ Sampath: behalf of you, they're doing the right types of things?

DJ Sampath: When these agents are acting autonomously by themselves, are they using system

DJ Sampath: accounts the right way? And so we acquired this company called Astrix,

Conor Bronsdon: uh you know

DJ Sampath: which is a phenomenal company, Astrix Security.

DJ Sampath: You know, they've thinking about non-human identities for a very long time With

DJ Sampath: agents, that becomes really front and center.

DJ Sampath: And we've already had a good book of business from Duo and Identity Services

DJ Sampath: Engine. So it made sense for us to be able to say, listen, we understand this really

DJ Sampath: well. But when you start putting all of these pieces together, we have arguably

DJ Sampath: the most comprehensive way of being able to understand an agentic view, like agent

DJ Sampath: behaviors. And that's really what unlocked the kind of success that we're seeing with

DJ Sampath: the rollout of 92,000, 90 plus thousand agents to our employees.

DJ Sampath: Um but one one of the things that we've noticed is that the open source

DJ Sampath: contributions that we've been doing They've been extremely well received.

DJ Sampath: Like, we have over 5,000 plus GitHub stars on the AI Defense projects, you know,

DJ Sampath: collectively. And so. We recognize that there's now a moment

DJ Sampath: in time where we have to step up and say, hey, How do we start to describe the

DJ Sampath: behaviors that you want an agent to take. In a very prescriptive way, that the

DJ Sampath: agents themselves understand that that is sort of their scope of what they need to

DJ Sampath: perform. So we basically said there needs to be a domain-specific language.

DJ Sampath: that describes these Yeah, agentic behavior.

DJ Sampath: And that's sort of what we're launching as an open source initiative.

DJ Sampath: And that's the news that you were referring

Conor Bronsdon: to.

DJ Sampath: it allows us to be able to um do really

Conor Bronsdon: me

DJ Sampath: interesting things because when you describe that hey here's what you all love

DJ Sampath: to do It suddenly changes the agent's behavior when it has a certain amount of

DJ Sampath: token budget.

DJ Sampath: and it says, okay, you know, I say for instance that the agent wants to

DJ Sampath: self-sacrifice itself for the larger good.

Conor Bronsdon: Ah, like kind of

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah. like that meteor investigation of OpenAI's agents into the Hugging Face

DJ Sampath: hack. That's right.

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah.

DJ Sampath: You can now basically define a policy in a DSL that says, hey, that is not an

DJ Sampath: acceptable thing. And it's going to define how the agent looks at that and goes, wait

DJ Sampath: a minute, these are the set of instructions that I have, in addition to

DJ Sampath: the goal that I have being given right now to be able to go out and execute.

DJ Sampath: my policy prevents me from doing this. So um we expect that you know the DSL is a

DJ Sampath: way that you could describe these agent behaviors.

DJ Sampath: We we're hoping that this basically is something that we can share with Other

DJ Sampath: industry partners to be able to help define these things, researchers, security

DJ Sampath: researchers, folks that are building operators.

DJ Sampath: Get them all together to be able to say, hey.

DJ Sampath: Provide that specification. and help everybody start to understand that your

DJ Sampath: agents can be governed a lot better. uh when you start using this um domain

DJ Sampath: specific language.

Conor Bronsdon: I'm really excited to check this out because You know, something I've talked

Conor Bronsdon: about on my newsletter, on the show, is the preponderance of various coding agents

Conor Bronsdon: I'm using across multiple model families. And governance and orchestration are huge

Conor Bronsdon: challenges.

Conor Bronsdon: It is really cool to see the advancements happening in the open here.

Conor Bronsdon: So very excited to try this out. And I will definitely link this in the show

Conor Bronsdon: notes so people who are listening and want to give it a whirl or just read a bit

Conor Bronsdon: about what Cisco's up to here can consume it.

Conor Bronsdon: But I'd love to frame this a bit more. So we're talking a lot about agents and how

Conor Bronsdon: to govern them and why that matters. And obviously you're learning a ton of

Conor Bronsdon: lessons, it sounds like, from this rollout of personal agents across Cisco.

Conor Bronsdon: But What are these personal agents doing at Cisco?

Conor Bronsdon: What's the actual work that they're achieving?

Conor Bronsdon: You talked about being mission-driven and value-aligned.

Conor Bronsdon: How are personal agents being used at Cisco today?

DJ Sampath: Yeah, one of the big things we discovered, you know, the the primary goal

DJ Sampath: was just to be able to allow people to first retrieve information.

DJ Sampath: Our initial hypotheses was that, people are going to want to retrieve a

DJ Sampath: presentation or a document or a PRD, and so make it easy for them to be able to

DJ Sampath: ingest this inside of an Agentic framework, ask questions, that they don't

DJ Sampath: have to keep copy pasting these files into different harnesses.

Conor Bronsdon: Oh.

DJ Sampath: However, what

DJ Sampath: you we learned very quickly where people started really using this.

DJ Sampath: Was the minute I think the teams activated a cron job, the ability to actually

DJ Sampath: execute a scheduled task. Um I know that sounds very obvious when you think about

DJ Sampath: it, but it's sort of one of the

Conor Bronsdon: them

DJ Sampath: basic functions that we start using it for like daily briefs and like summaries

DJ Sampath: at the end of the day, for meeting notes.

DJ Sampath: I think one of the biggest unlock that happened was, A lot of times at work,

DJ Sampath: we're in meetings, right? And in the case Cisco, we're doing a lot of Webex

DJ Sampath: meetings, right? And so. Every single one of these Webex meetings now has the

DJ Sampath: ability to get transcribed. And at the end of the day, when you have an agent that

DJ Sampath: can hook into that over APIs. collect all of the notes, take all of the actions,

DJ Sampath: summarize it for you, and keep track of those actions so that you know which ones

DJ Sampath: you've completed, which ones you've not, reminds you as part of your daily brief.

DJ Sampath: Man, that just changed the way we thought about productivity inside.

Conor Bronsdon: And DJ, I do have to admit here, as much as I am a fan of the security work

Conor Bronsdon: being done at Cisco and the open source work with agent orchestration.

Conor Bronsdon: I'm not a big Webex guy, I'm more of a Google Meet guy, hooks into

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah, my yeah. Gmail, but yeah,

DJ Sampath: you'd be shocked how good

DJ Sampath: what Webex is.

Conor Bronsdon: Okay, okay.

Conor Bronsdon: I It's truly been a

Conor Bronsdon: believe. couple of years, I haven't used

Conor Bronsdon: See, it in a while, so yeah.

DJ Sampath: I think you should try it out. We

Conor Bronsdon: I have arguably argue

DJ Sampath: some of the best devices. Now I'm just gonna go ahead and pitch.

DJ Sampath: Anytime somebody tells me this, I gotta.

Conor Bronsdon: All right, next question.

DJ Sampath: We have arguably some of the best devices.

DJ Sampath: Like the quality of the devices, the microphones, you know, we use AI to be

DJ Sampath: able to do, like, you know. Automatic framing of people depending on where you

DJ Sampath: are into the conference rooms. Noise cancellation is.

DJ Sampath: Off the charts. It's

DJ Sampath: Okay. one of the best on the planet. And it's really simple to use.

DJ Sampath: And by the way, our devices support. Teams and Slack and like, you know, Zoom.

DJ Sampath: Yeah, no other device out there does that, so we're pretty cool, man.

Conor Bronsdon: Okay, and so you're connecting these devices and all the inputs and outputs

Conor Bronsdon: from them to these personal agents so people can ingest meeting notes and have

Conor Bronsdon: actions tracked. What are other use cases you're seeing from personal agents

Conor Bronsdon: throughout the organization?

DJ Sampath: Well the the one of the biggest things that we're um we're seeing from the

DJ Sampath: engineering side of the house is they're they're using this to be able to track

DJ Sampath: their you know um uh the work output. Like, hey,

Conor Bronsdon: geotickets

DJ Sampath: Which Jira tickets are getting solved. They're hooking up these agents to their

DJ Sampath: codex agents. And so as they're looking at like, hey, there's a pull request that's

DJ Sampath: coming in. Hey, can you tell me like, you know, what are the biggest sort of

DJ Sampath: changes? And so a lot of people initially thought that Codex was sufficient, right?

DJ Sampath: I could just use Codex. But then came the issue of like, hey, how do I do this

DJ Sampath: remote management of Codex? And as much as the remote options that Codex natively

DJ Sampath: provides is good. we had concerns around like how do we make machines accessible

DJ Sampath: over a VPN. MyAgent

Conor Bronsdon: identifier

DJ Sampath: solved a lot of that part of the problem.

DJ Sampath: So so engineers are using that for that uh purpose.

DJ Sampath: Non-engineering staff is using it for creating like presentations.

DJ Sampath: the most interesting thing that we've seen people use it is to be able to create like

DJ Sampath: dashboards um on the fly. Hey,

DJ Sampath: uh what is just happening with the latest pipeline?

DJ Sampath: Tell me where we are in this quarter, how many deals have closed, what kind of

DJ Sampath: customers, give me a

DJ Sampath: quick information about this customer that I'm about

Conor Bronsdon: to

DJ Sampath: to go out and meet. And so it's hooking into Salesforce at the back, it's pulling

DJ Sampath: in information that tells them exactly. What is the last most recent touch, and

DJ Sampath: what happened to that customer? And so I think we're starting to see the usage.

DJ Sampath: the way I know this personally is like, well, this rollout was happening.

DJ Sampath: My team is responsible for securing the use of it.

DJ Sampath: And so the number of tokens that

Conor Bronsdon: be we were restored

DJ Sampath: starting to see flow through this on a weekly basis.

DJ Sampath: Skyrocketed from like, you know, a small number of tokens to like 2 trillion tokens

DJ Sampath: in a single week. And so they're using it for pretty much any use case that you

DJ Sampath: could imagine. it's currently being used for that.

DJ Sampath: And again, these are very obvious use cases, but unlocking them with company

DJ Sampath: proprietary data, which I think makes all the difference.

Conor Bronsdon: I want to ask about Codex in particular, because as we speak, we're

Conor Bronsdon: what, a block, two blocks from OpenAI offices.

Conor Bronsdon: And my understanding is that Cisco was an early design partner on Codex, had early

DJ Sampath: That's right.

Conor Bronsdon: access, helped shape. this incredible product, which by the way, insane that it

Conor Bronsdon: only came out in February.

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah. Just mind blowing how much progress has happened this year.

Conor Bronsdon: OpenAI's case study with Cisco wrote that more than 95% of new AI features at Cisco

Conor Bronsdon: are being shipped with Codex. what does a human engineer's day look like now with

Conor Bronsdon: personal agents connecting their Codex instances?

Conor Bronsdon: How has this all changed over the year as you've gone from design partner and maybe

Conor Bronsdon: helping shape the early pieces of product to Now securing this ever-evolving

Conor Bronsdon: scope of agents that are also leveraging Codex.

Conor Bronsdon: to code.

Conor Bronsdon: you no.

DJ Sampath: know, when we got started with uh with the Open AI team, it was it was

DJ Sampath: phenomenal. their willingness to like say, Hey, listen, this thing is super

DJ Sampath: broly. early It's probably going to break, but would you like to test it out?

DJ Sampath: The response from Cisco and my team has always been yes, and you know, we

DJ Sampath: completely recognize that this is early, um, what that

Conor Bronsdon: What

DJ Sampath: resulted in in our conversations with them and working closely with them was

DJ Sampath: that It was the lived experiences of the team members inside of OpenAI.

DJ Sampath: How they were using Codex was extremely informative for us to be able to say, Oh,

DJ Sampath: that's that's how they're thinking about it, that's how they've automated the CI/CD

DJ Sampath: pipeline, that's how they're thinking about the tickets.

DJ Sampath: Um, and that evolution that happened inside of OpenAI was so rapid and

Conor Bronsdon: in

DJ Sampath: Learning from that was extremely beneficial for a large part of our team

DJ Sampath: members, going, Oh, wow, I didn't realize you could do that.

DJ Sampath: Um you know all of the bottlenecks that there

Conor Bronsdon: and there

DJ Sampath: were we kind of had to take our priors and wipe them and say hey these priors no

DJ Sampath: longer hold true and this is sort of how we need to operate.

Conor Bronsdon: I think we're all having to do that, frankly.

DJ Sampath: And we're having to do that so often

Conor Bronsdon: every couple of weeks.

DJ Sampath: every Yeah. couple of weeks,

DJ Sampath: Yeah. right? And so this was one of those moments for us.

Conor Bronsdon: One of What are

DJ Sampath: the things as we brought Codex in, as people have started using it, pretty much

DJ Sampath: to do all of the coding work. Um, you know, they're the pull request reviews at

DJ Sampath: this point in time. I think

Conor Bronsdon: think

DJ Sampath: the the big aha moment was like with each and every single um um generation

DJ Sampath: model that comes out. You also have to kind of wipe out, just like you were

DJ Sampath: wiping out your priors, you have to wipe out your skills files because you've built

DJ Sampath: a lot of these things thinking that, hey, I'm going to need help with some of these

DJ Sampath: things. So they've built some. Capabilities around the harness itself to

DJ Sampath: be able to solve certain problems with them.

DJ Sampath: And and we've

DJ Sampath: we had to like completely wipe that out and say, Hey, new model came out.

DJ Sampath: this new model's more capable.

Conor Bronsdon: I admit I'm less convinced on this argument, so I I'm I want to unpack this a

Conor Bronsdon: little bit because I totally agree. You need to reassess with each new model

Conor Bronsdon: generation. The rate of intelligence, the cost of intelligence are both changing

Conor Bronsdon: rapidly. But I don't think you should throw your skills out wholesale.

Conor Bronsdon: I know a lot of people are giving that advice.

Conor Bronsdon: Uh my opinion is you should be refactoring them every time.

DJ Sampath: it's a good good point that you bring up.

DJ Sampath: I think you're right. I think refactoring is is definitely

DJ Sampath: you know, one of those things. I I think that the thing that I, you know, struggle

DJ Sampath: mostly is with People getting very um um uh How do I say this?

Conor Bronsdon: Like attached to a workflow.

DJ Sampath: Attached to their workflows.

Conor Bronsdon: You have Yes. to change, yes.

DJ Sampath: You've got to change because there is no point in getting attached to your

DJ Sampath: workflows because

DJ Sampath: You know, I've seen people go like, oh, you know, they give names to their, you

DJ Sampath: know, just like way they name their personal assistants.

DJ Sampath: they have their own bot that's running. Um that's customized and it's like, oh, you

DJ Sampath: know, here's my personal PR bot. I'm gonna call it Jarvis.

DJ Sampath: I think that's our problem right there. Um and so so what we're trying to tell people

Conor Bronsdon: is like, that

DJ Sampath: say, hey, listen, the things that you're building, you gotta refactor them.

DJ Sampath: In fact, I'll give you a simple example, right?

DJ Sampath: So A lot of times in the first iterations, It wasn't doing very specific types of

DJ Sampath: security checks in the source code that you would have had.

DJ Sampath: So

DJ Sampath: you you've created the skill file, which is pretty large.

DJ Sampath: And and so what ends up happening is that every time a pull request was happening,

DJ Sampath: You are now loading this inside of your context window for every single back and

DJ Sampath: forth that's going on because that is important for it to be able to go out and

DJ Sampath: assess.

DJ Sampath: that consumed a lot of tokens. It consumed a lot of back and forth that's happening.

DJ Sampath: It reduced the attention on the, especially if your code base is starting

DJ Sampath: to grow in sizes, or your pull request is a pretty

Conor Bronsdon: which large if

DJ Sampath: pull you're coding request.

Conor Bronsdon: with agents, you definitely have a growing code

DJ Sampath: That's base. right. And and you

DJ Sampath: we have large pull requests coming in, like, you know, pull requests are like

DJ Sampath: forty thousand lines

DJ Sampath: Well, of code.

Conor Bronsdon: you can limit that if you have good rules for your agents.

DJ Sampath: Right, but

Conor Bronsdon: Yeah.

Conor Bronsdon: But you might understand

DJ Sampath: want to start like tuning all of that stuff because guess what?

DJ Sampath: The context window sizes for these models are growing with each and every single si

DJ Sampath: i iteration.

Conor Bronsdon: But it doesn't mean that not having a lot of context does not make it less

Conor Bronsdon: efficient at times.

DJ Sampath: That's right. So

Conor Bronsdon: To your points.

DJ Sampath: So, so you just have to come back in and say, Hey, what if I didn't need to do

DJ Sampath: these things? Because next generation model already comes in with a lot of these

DJ Sampath: security checks baked into it. It

DJ Sampath: come comes with new types of unit tests that you never thought about because

Conor Bronsdon: was it's just

DJ Sampath: thinking through all those things. So, which meant that you can go

Conor Bronsdon: can

DJ Sampath: back in and say, Hey, I don't need these things that I put in there anymore.

DJ Sampath: to your point, you're right. You know, don't throw them away, but it's worthwhile

DJ Sampath: block coming in

DJ Sampath: be and willing saying,

Conor Bronsdon: to, though, too. To your point, yeah.

DJ Sampath: There's some things that you might

DJ Sampath: not have to throw away,

Conor Bronsdon: throw

DJ Sampath: some things you want to refactor, saying, Hey, you know what, here's the

DJ Sampath: context that you need to go get, here are the tools that I'm using.

DJ Sampath: There might be some custom dependencies that you want to still be able to acquire.

DJ Sampath: But I think the most interesting part is People are starting to bring in workflows

DJ Sampath: from like, you know, there are agents that are not necessarily just the My Agents,

DJ Sampath: the thing that we roll out, but there there are other agents that they wanna

Conor Bronsdon: start to Like

Conor Bronsdon: bring someone's in. bringing their Muse workflow in, for example.

DJ Sampath: Right, we haven't

Conor Bronsdon: we

DJ Sampath: quite in a unblocked people

Conor Bronsdon: by

DJ Sampath: bringing in muse into the workplace just yet, but historically they've had

DJ Sampath: their own bots that they've built using OpenClaw and hooked up via APIs into

DJ Sampath: either an agent SDK that came from. OpenAI or Anthropic.

DJ Sampath: And they were using that to be able to perform a lot of the workflows that they

DJ Sampath: needed. And because the existing bots, I mean, the MyAgent that we rolled out just

DJ Sampath: happened a few weeks ago. they already had these three existing bots in place.

DJ Sampath: And so they were starting to connect each one of these things together.

Conor Bronsdon: Now, Now,

DJ Sampath: there are agents inside of the SaaS software that we purchase, right?

DJ Sampath: Now Always, they're they're

DJ Sampath: yeah. agents inside of Salesforce or agents inside of Notion.

DJ Sampath: And so we had to up with a more thoughtful way of saying, hey, how do we first of all

DJ Sampath: recognize and discover these Shadow agents, if you

DJ Sampath: And it's a very common problem that used to exist before called shadow IT.

DJ Sampath: We're using the same moniker to be able to describe shadow agents.

DJ Sampath: And these are agents that have come in via some other sources.

DJ Sampath: So what you got to do is to make sure that A, you discover them.

DJ Sampath: And then once you discover them, you want to apply certain rules of how and what

DJ Sampath: they operate on. and then you gotta also provide, you know, hey, which identities

DJ Sampath: are you allowed to Emulate to be able to get your tasks done.

DJ Sampath: And so once you have those three things locked in, Then you go out and say, okay,

DJ Sampath: listen, I'm going to make sure that I'm constantly observing the actions that

DJ Sampath: these agents are taking. And if they start to deviate, you want to be able to send

DJ Sampath: out an alert saying, hey, is this something that you intended for this agent

DJ Sampath: to do?

Conor Bronsdon: How are you enforcing

Conor Bronsdon: mechanisms against these shadow agents that may not be as tuned to the security,

Conor Bronsdon: observability, and evaluation measures that Cisco has with my agent?

DJ Sampath: Cisco has a zero trust solution that we use internally.

DJ Sampath: That we also sell. It's called Cisco Secure Access.

DJ Sampath: And we have a mechanism of being able to, you know, say, hey, listen,

Conor Bronsdon: Here are are

DJ Sampath: the agents that we love, and here are the agents that we don't love.

DJ Sampath: Um, these are

Conor Bronsdon: These

DJ Sampath: not as

DJ Sampath: not fine-grained or granular as you would like, and we're constantly adding

DJ Sampath: capabilities, and so stay tuned for. uh some pretty

Conor Bronsdon: Okay.

DJ Sampath: cool stuff that we're going to do over there to be able to look at how do you

DJ Sampath: love nuanced actions that the agents are taking?

DJ Sampath: Right now when we see that somebody's using an agent inside of a solution that

DJ Sampath: is not approved, we just go ahead

DJ Sampath: go and simply put in a policy to say, nope, that's blocked.

DJ Sampath: And so when you try to access that feature, it just wouldn't pop up.

DJ Sampath: It'd say, hey, sorry, this is being blocked.

DJ Sampath: The core belief that we have internally for ourselves, and what we believe

DJ Sampath: everybody should. have is they shouldn't

Conor Bronsdon: that see C

DJ Sampath: security as a roadblock. You got to be able to use security as an accelerator

DJ Sampath: somehow.

DJ Sampath: This is one of those rare occasions where You're going to notice that agent safety

DJ Sampath: and security is actually going to accelerate adoption

DJ Sampath: because it's going to give people the confidence to be able to use these tools.

DJ Sampath: And what we're doing is to unlock that for every single agent that we're bringing

DJ Sampath: into our enterprise, whether it's agents that um the enterprise is building

DJ Sampath: themselves or agents that they're consuming from like You know, a SaaS

DJ Sampath: provider or personal agents that they want to bring on board.

DJ Sampath: And you'll notice that the industry is sort of moving the direction where they're

DJ Sampath: opening up like OTel export. capabilities and endpoints where you understand exactly

DJ Sampath: what the agents are doing. And you have the ability to ingest that and say, you

DJ Sampath: know what, I can now ingest this inside of my data lake.

DJ Sampath: I can ingest this inside of my Splunk instance and I can observe what's really

DJ Sampath: happening. Because that increases the level of confidence that you get in terms

DJ Sampath: of using these agents.

Conor Bronsdon: And I think this is a really key point we should drill in on a bit because The

Conor Bronsdon: confidence piece, I think, is underrated. We've talked on this show before for the

Conor Bronsdon: last couple of years about how important it is to have confidence that your agents

Conor Bronsdon: are going to perform in production. And this was stopping a lot of agentic

Conor Bronsdon: rollouts, particularly at enterprises, in 2025 and I think early 2026.

DJ Sampath: No, 100%, right? I going

DJ Sampath: You're gonna to see this

DJ Sampath: is evolution, right? We started out with chatbots.

DJ Sampath: We're evolving to agents they're doing a bunch of things.

DJ Sampath: we're very quickly going to start see physical AI become a real thing.

DJ Sampath: And I think what you're you're seeing that is you're constantly increasing the amount

DJ Sampath: of autonomy that you're giving to machines, starting with like agents

DJ Sampath: sitting in an environment to like You know, agents that are going to run inside

DJ Sampath: of, you know, robots that are going to move around, do things that are going to

DJ Sampath: interface with you in the physical world. I think what's going to happen is that

DJ Sampath: it's to become. increasingly important to understand that slider scale.

Conor Bronsdon: apply

DJ Sampath: of like, you know, how much of autonomy and agency are you providing to these

DJ Sampath: systems to be able to effectively

DJ Sampath: do tasks on your behalf. I think it's going to be the reinstatement of

DJ Sampath: dependable systems. We've always done the

DJ Sampath: done study of dependable systems. I

DJ Sampath: can't think we're we're now going

Conor Bronsdon: want

DJ Sampath: to start to see security and safety unlocking how we think about dependable

DJ Sampath: systems from the ground up.

Conor Bronsdon: So, I want to ask about dependability

DJ Sampath: ability

DJ Sampath: here in

Conor Bronsdon: because one aspect of that, and a lot of our audience knows about this, is.

Conor Bronsdon: the engineering side and code review, ensuring accuracy, ensuring you don't have

Conor Bronsdon: bugs that get in. the approach that Cisco's taking to code review at scale,

Conor Bronsdon: particularly when I know Codex is driving a lot of your development.

Conor Bronsdon: But my understanding is you also work with Anthropic and other model providers as

Conor Bronsdon: well.

DJ Sampath: We do, yeah. Um you know, I think we're we're constantly Assessing which models

DJ Sampath: are best for which tasks. we're using Frontier models.

DJ Sampath: We're using open source, open rate models.

DJ Sampath: We're building models ourselves, which are post-trained models on top of some of the

DJ Sampath: open source models like Nemotron.

DJ Sampath: And we're using those to be able to perform very specific types of tasks

DJ Sampath: that's trained on proprietary data that we have.

DJ Sampath: And so we're always picking and choosing the the best models for the best uh type

DJ Sampath: of task. Now in the case of pull requests, man um Yeah.

DJ Sampath: PRs became a bottleneck very quickly as the agents started pushing out a lot of

DJ Sampath: code. Um now every single um

Conor Bronsdon: uh

DJ Sampath: person has their own respective PR

Conor Bronsdon: gods.

DJ Sampath: bots. which provides a little bit of taste and judgment that each and every

DJ Sampath: single engineer has in terms of like how they like to review code.

DJ Sampath: And they've like put those agents.md

DJ Sampath: files that actually describe

Conor Bronsdon: that

DJ Sampath: how they like to do the reviews. And so you will see that every once in a while,

DJ Sampath: The review bot

Conor Bronsdon: block

DJ Sampath: comes with like requests that you've normally seen that same person like, you

DJ Sampath: know, submit. But it's essentially talking to the agent that actually submitted the

DJ Sampath: pull request. And so you will

Conor Bronsdon: You

DJ Sampath: even though you

DJ Sampath: know, look at that and you go, Yeah, you know, that's interesting, but um the

DJ Sampath: agents are the ones that are coming up with the PR and pushing changes back in

DJ Sampath: and then starting to do the merges. So I think we've gotten to the a level

Conor Bronsdon: a

DJ Sampath: of maturity at this point that the pull request reviews are being done by agents,

DJ Sampath: but with very specific set of instructions in terms of how you want to think about

DJ Sampath: security, how do you want to think about code clarity?

DJ Sampath: Are you thinking about Um in a modularity, are you making sure that it's checking

DJ Sampath: through like packages that you've used before?

DJ Sampath: Are you making sure that you're using open source packages with the right licenses?

DJ Sampath: are a lot of these instructions that are constantly being shared amongst teams that

DJ Sampath: make its way inside. And on top of that, there's always some amount of like, hey, I

DJ Sampath: like using single ticks versus double ticks.

DJ Sampath: It's a lot of those nuances start to creep in from a taste and judgment perspective,

DJ Sampath: which is kind of cool. But that's sort of how we solved it, right?

DJ Sampath: And I think again, Sometimes it's different models, like

DJ Sampath: You know, if you're

Conor Bronsdon: if

DJ Sampath: using Astro to code it up, you know, your opus, you know Uh is probably doing

DJ Sampath: the polar crust review. We try to change some of these models.

Conor Bronsdon: Multimodal family helps a ton because you catch bias across families.

DJ Sampath: them. And sometimes

DJ Sampath: same there are some teams that actually switch between model providers.

DJ Sampath: And sometimes they using open source, open-weight models, you know, to be able

DJ Sampath: to do this.

Conor Bronsdon: Gotta give a self-plug here that if you're interested in great code review, I

Conor Bronsdon: have a whole article on that on my newsletter at

Conor Bronsdon: newsletter.chainofthought.show. So definitely check that out.

Conor Bronsdon: And I am curious to hear from you, DJ. Is your team Also then taking the data from

Conor Bronsdon: your pull requests. and creating evals based off of that to then

Conor Bronsdon: Oh 100%. apply.

DJ Sampath: All the time.

Conor Bronsdon: know, we're, Uh

Conor Bronsdon: A, we're if you were

DJ Sampath: looking at pull requests. B,

Conor Bronsdon: we we're were

DJ Sampath: also like you know, a lot of times what ends happening is this kicks off our C D

DJ Sampath: workflows, right? You know, we're constantly doing continuous integration

DJ Sampath: into our existing systems, continuous deployments.

DJ Sampath: And so as we do that in our sandbox environment, we're collecting the traces

DJ Sampath: of how these things are running. using that to understand like hey are they

DJ Sampath: behaving the way that they should be As part of those test deployments, even

DJ Sampath: before we move something into production. And so there's a lot of that.

DJ Sampath: That's going on. We've built the pipelines.

DJ Sampath: It took a good chunk of time to be able to get those pipelines right.

DJ Sampath: And it's worth that investment. But then it starts to speed things up, you know,

DJ Sampath: from all the way from like spec design to like.

DJ Sampath: being able to see that work product that shows up at the end.

DJ Sampath: One of the biggest things we've also unlocked is once a code delivery happens.

DJ Sampath: is to go back

Conor Bronsdon: go and back

DJ Sampath: say, hey,

Conor Bronsdon: why the

DJ Sampath: rewrite the spec for this at this point in time.

DJ Sampath: And so you can see the spec drift. It

Conor Bronsdon: That happens from

DJ Sampath: from like the initial starting point to like where it landed.

DJ Sampath: And recognize and reconcile, like, hey, wait a minute, this is not what I asked

DJ Sampath: for. Or, I didn't even realize that we've evolved at this point in time.

DJ Sampath: So, retros

Conor Bronsdon: The

DJ Sampath: look a lot different because you're just looking at spec drift.

DJ Sampath: And you're also starting

DJ Sampath: started to look

DJ Sampath: looking at: hey, how do I retool this entire process?

DJ Sampath: You know Um, and so so we've done a lot of work uh on that front and I think we've

DJ Sampath: had these big aha moments where we we've had to sit back and go, Wow, That's not

DJ Sampath: the way I thought we were going to evolve.

DJ Sampath: this is such a brand new paradigm

DJ Sampath: I work. of how we work today.

Conor Bronsdon: And I've heard you say before that security today can no longer run at human

Conor Bronsdon: speed. And that has so many implications, but for the security team members

Conor Bronsdon: listening, for the CISOs listening. How should they be thinking about this next

Conor Bronsdon: era?

Conor Bronsdon: Listen, Was it Addie?

DJ Sampath: I think yesterday was a you know, very, very interesting day.

DJ Sampath: Railway, Uh

Conor Bronsdon: PHP, so many other examples.

DJ Sampath: so many examples in a single day. And I think a lot of people sort of started to

DJ Sampath: understand that this is sort of the new normal.

DJ Sampath: Greg Brockman talked about the defender's window.

DJ Sampath: these models became so powerful at some point that said, hey, there's going to be

DJ Sampath: a finite amount of time that you have from Defender's perspective to be able to

DJ Sampath: leverage these powerful models to be able to go out and figure out where you have

DJ Sampath: vulnerabilities and go start to fix them. Cisco's been part of both the Glasswing

DJ Sampath: and the Daybreak projects. And from both Anthropic and OpenAI to be able to

DJ Sampath: Use these models to be able to find vulnerabilities and fix them and sort of

DJ Sampath: be part of that community. Um I think one of the

DJ Sampath: the big things we learned that whole part of the process is that, you know, and

DJ Sampath: I'm we

DJ Sampath: kind of mute knew

Conor Bronsdon: us

DJ Sampath: this even before. was the amount of time it takes, you know, for an exploit to

DJ Sampath: show up in the wild. from the time that a C V E was announced, It used to be months,

DJ Sampath: you know, and if not, sometimes in some cases, those are years.

DJ Sampath: And now it's like sub-eight minutes and it's only decreasing.

DJ Sampath: So which means the minute you publish something, like when the PHP, like one of

DJ Sampath: the interesting data that came out that Matthew Prince was talking about it from

DJ Sampath: with with Cloudflare

Conor Bronsdon: Pogfli errors.

DJ Sampath: They saw some amount of attacks on the PHP stuff, like, you know, and there was

DJ Sampath: non-trivial amounts. But the minute the C V E was published and it became a thing,

DJ Sampath: That number went into the millions where they became aware of this, bots started

DJ Sampath: reading these things and instantly started exploiting, you know, any open websites

DJ Sampath: that were so using PHPs. Right. So this is

DJ Sampath: is sort of like

DJ Sampath: like a very uh interesting thing to keep in mind when you think about attacks

DJ Sampath: taxes are now starting to happen at agent speed.

DJ Sampath: Your defenders need to start moving at agent speed as And to do that, you're

DJ Sampath: going to need to invest in. You know, agents that understand your security

DJ Sampath: posture, agents that understand the context of how your applications are being

DJ Sampath: deployed. Being able to recognize the kind of access that you have, the identity that

DJ Sampath: you have. And then coming up with a mechanism of being able to say, hey, hang

DJ Sampath: on, this doesn't look quite right. you looked at the the Microsoft attack that

DJ Sampath: just happened, you know, and you know, with with the whole um you know th the um

DJ Sampath: the the swarm

DJ Sampath: I think the th the thing that it did first was uh you know it attempted one hundred

DJ Sampath: and twenty thousand logins. You know, there were failing logins, but it still

DJ Sampath: attempted that. You know, I think this is a really interesting, exercise in

DJ Sampath: recognizing that if you knew that there are failed logins that are starting to

DJ Sampath: show up. you now have to start thinking about, hey, what do I need to do?

DJ Sampath: to be able to completely retool my my systems so that Yeah.

DJ Sampath: You just block them further

DJ Sampath: and further, you know, farther and farther

DJ Sampath: further away

DJ Sampath: raw from the perimeter. So I think that is really

Conor Bronsdon: uh

DJ Sampath: a reimagination of how you can start operating at agent speed, right?

DJ Sampath: you gotta get you know, really smart about I can't compromise this.

DJ Sampath: You got to get really smart about specific kinds of breaches that you're going to

DJ Sampath: start to see. You got to get smart about east-west traffic.

DJ Sampath: As you start to think about how attacks start to propagate, you gotta get smarter

DJ Sampath: about you know, workplace protection. And then a lot of these things will start to

DJ Sampath: come together inside of an agentic SOC. Um and and that's really how you know we at

DJ Sampath: Cisco have been thinking about um How do you start reacting at agentic speed is

DJ Sampath: about Understanding each and every single one of these pieces and then stitching

DJ Sampath: them together collectively.

Conor Bronsdon: I think it's so interesting to explore the incredible security rollout you've had

Conor Bronsdon: to do for 90,000 personal agents across the organization with my agent.

Conor Bronsdon: DJ, thank you so much for having us here to the Cisco offices

DJ Sampath: SNA

Conor Bronsdon: today to explore this topic. I do want to say a quick thank you to our presenting

Conor Bronsdon: sponsors, Inngest. Who do incredible work around long-running agents for helping

Conor Bronsdon: make this show happen? DJ, where can folks go to follow your work?

Conor Bronsdon: Hey, uh

DJ Sampath: yeah, you should check out cisco.com. We put out a lot of interesting blog

DJ Sampath: posts. Twitter handle is Cisco AI. And um I'm uh at DJ Sampath.

Conor Bronsdon: I'd love to hear from our listeners here as well.

Conor Bronsdon: Are you using Codex today? Claude Code, T3 Code?

Conor Bronsdon: Some other open code? What's the harness that you're using for your coding agents?

Conor Bronsdon: Or have you converted to assigning work to coding agents?

Conor Bronsdon: from your personal agents. We're very curious to hear from our listeners.

Conor Bronsdon: So let us know in the comments on Spotify, on LinkedIn, Twitter, X.

Conor Bronsdon: or YouTube, wherever you're listening, we'd love to hear from you.

Conor Bronsdon: DJ, I'd love to understand from your perspective.

Conor Bronsdon: As Codex and AI coding models have accelerated what you're able to deliver

Conor Bronsdon: on the engineering side with Cisco. while also accelerating the pace and scale of

Conor Bronsdon: attacks. What are you doing to enhance Cisco Cloud Control and enable defense

Conor Bronsdon: around the entire enterprise?

DJ Sampath: Yeah, listen, you know, Cisco Cloud Control was this project just to ground

Conor Bronsdon: the audience operations

DJ Sampath: on this as well. You know, Cisco has over like a hundred and you know thirty

DJ Sampath: plus queues over you know, sign it for different products over over, 17 different

DJ Sampath: kinds of platforms, it was really important to start to bring all of these

DJ Sampath: pieces together. And, you know, so one of the missions that my team embarked upon.

DJ Sampath: was this thing about saying, hey, look, we're going to bring all of these pieces

DJ Sampath: together. and we're going to build this thing called Cisco Cloud Control.

DJ Sampath: Now at that point in time, this was uh you know, summer of last year.

DJ Sampath: agentic coding quite wasn't real. It's kind of crazy to think about like You

DJ Sampath: know, just 12 months ago, or a little over 12 months ago, everybody was vibe coding

DJ Sampath: at that point in time, right? and agentic engineering wasn't thing.

DJ Sampath: And uh and we started, you know, hammering away at it and um Roughly around October,

DJ Sampath: November was when We started getting our hands on the previews of some of the

DJ Sampath: agentic coding capabilities and Boy, we lucked out, right.

DJ Sampath: I think it was, uh, was one

DJ Sampath: one of those of moments where We

Conor Bronsdon: We'd

DJ Sampath: had set ourselves a a know a 12-month deadline to be able to do something that

DJ Sampath: was next to impossible. And uh and we were

Conor Bronsdon: would

DJ Sampath: rescued by agentic coding because All of a sudden, we started seeing this

DJ Sampath: throughput go up. In fact, we, in record time, in a little over eight months, were

DJ Sampath: able to start stitching all of these different parts of the portfolio together

DJ Sampath: and start to offer an experience to our customers where they go, oh my God, this

DJ Sampath: thing is really, really cool. I didn't know that I could.

DJ Sampath: Like troubleshoot and debug from like networks to like security to like

DJ Sampath: observabilities in a single shot. And they started seeing these things come together

DJ Sampath: in ways that. Fundamentally altered how you thought about the infrastructure that

DJ Sampath: you're deploying inside of an office like our

DJ Sampath: Narios Cisco campus right here. So that really

Conor Bronsdon: was

DJ Sampath: was something that was remarkable about what we could do with agentic coding.

DJ Sampath: And then we took that harness and we said, listen, we're going to put these agentic

DJ Sampath: coding inside a Cloud Control. So you.

DJ Sampath: Ms. Customer or Mr. Customer, you can now deploy your own sets of capabilities.

DJ Sampath: You can almost sort of think about Cloud Control as a secure harness.

DJ Sampath: you to build agentic experiences on top this.

DJ Sampath: that solves your needs, your your work, your problems in meaningful ways.

Conor Bronsdon: And I know it can be scary because we are seeing these incidents and there's

Conor Bronsdon: concerns and we should address them. But this is also the most exciting time ever

Conor Bronsdon: to be building because So much more is possible today.

Conor Bronsdon: And I would just encourage our listeners and everyone who's out there coding today

Conor Bronsdon: to be more ambitious because models are capable of more than you think.

Conor Bronsdon: You can give it all the context you need and your your taste, your knowledge, your

Conor Bronsdon: thought processes, your architectural thinking.

Conor Bronsdon: is so much more valuable today because you can accelerate your execution with agents.

Conor Bronsdon: And I I couldn't be more excited for the future.

Conor Bronsdon: And DJ, thank you for sharing your thoughts on it today.

DJ Sampath: 100%. You know, it's time to build.