AI can produce polished work without guaranteeing real understanding. If the artifact no longer proves expertise, how should organizations recognize judgment, accountability, and competence? The first in an ongoing series exploring AI’s impact on work and decision making.
Splunk isn't just a security tool anymore—it's foundational plumbing. Admitting his own "insightful lack of insight" as a non-power user, Robb Boyd unpacks his real-time realizations from Cisco Live 2026 on how Splunk is quietly becoming the core intelligence infrastructure of the enterprise.
LLM guardrails aren't rules. They're requests. An AI agent deleted an entire AWS environment — not a bug, not a hack, it was optimizing. Jillian Anderson-Nix and Istvan Berko of WWT on what agentic AI security actually looks like in practice.
eBPF now runs inside Cisco's NX-OS — applying real-time, no-reboot compensating controls directly in the switch OS. The Self-Defending Network Cisco promised in 2004 finally has the technology to back it up.
*Cisco made a silicon bet before AI existed. Now that bet is a structural moat. Here's why the networking problem at the heart of enterprise AI is exactly the problem Cisco spent years quietly solving — and what that means for practitioners making infrastructure decisions today.*
I want to tell you about a moment of almost-bias. Darryl Monroe joined our recording session quiet. Gaming headset on. Newer face to me — first time we'd worked together. Next to him was Jack French, AVP of Cloud Practice at WWT, seven years with the company, easy
Sovereignty is moving from philosophy into procurement. The useful question is not whether a system is “sovereign,” but which dependencies still matter, what breaks under pressure, and which ones to reduce next.
Two conversations happened before this episode that most people never see. One was two nerds troubleshooting echo cancellation. The other was a sales expert asking an uncomfortable question nobody had bothered to slow down and answer. Both made the show.
Cisco acquired a hallucination detector and an AI identity cop in the same week. That's not a coincidence — it's a platform bet on who governs the agentic enterprise.
Your hardware is on-prem. Your data never leaves the building. But during a 36-hour outage, everything stops. Why? Because the "brain" of your system is still tethered to the cloud. It’s time to move past the hybrid facade and find true sovereignty. Is your brain local?
20 minutes into the recording, Doug Wong dropped a truth bomb: "I can’t turn on a VM without the network, and I can’t get the network up without the VM." It’s the ultimate paradox. We’ve virtualized everything for efficiency, but we’ve locked the keys to the burning room inside the room.
90% of data centers can’t handle next-gen AI. Most buy hardware first, only to realize it’ll crush their floors or melt their cooling. Don't let a $10M AI investment become a "loading dock ornament" while you wait 3 years to plug it in.