My Cisco Live 2026: Live Builds, VibeOps Energy & the Agent Era

I am still catching my breath.

Cisco Live US 2026 was a blur in the best possible way. For a week in Las Vegas, the energy around AI and agents was everywhere you turned, and our corner of it, the VibeOps Lounge, was packed. I got to do what I love most: stand in front of a room full of network and infrastructure engineers, build things live, and talk shop with the people who actually run the networks the world depends on.

I caught up with old friends. I met engineers who had built their whole automation program off a conversation we started years ago. I met skeptics who walked in with their arms crossed and walked out asking how to get started on Monday. We had a blast. And somewhere between the demos, the hallway conversations, and more than a few late nights, something clicked for me about where this industry is heading.

We Picked the Moment & Launched FlowAI

At Cisco Live, Itential brought FlowAI to general availability.

If you have heard me talk this year, you know the line. FlowAI is the agentic harness of the Itential Platform. It lets you build, run, and govern agents that reason through a goal and then execute on real infrastructure, with the same RBAC, approval gates, and audit you already trust. Reasoning and execution, together, governed by default.

I did not want to talk about it on slides, so in the Lounge I built it. In one session I stood up three agents live. One in the FlowAgent Builder by hand. Two more from a single prompt in Claude Code using our Builder Skills and Spec-Driven Development. We pulled live device state with pyATS, synced interfaces into NetBox and back the other way, and captured every step as reusable artifacts in Git. Real devices, real output, in front of a real crowd.

A Week of Building & Teaching

That was just one session. Across the week I got to teach the whole arc of where we are right now. We demystified Model Context Protocol and built real MCP servers from scratch. We dug into NetClaw and what agentic networking looks like when you wrap it in guardrails. We walked through Spec-Driven Development and why the spec, not the code, is becoming the source of truth. And one of my favorites, we showed how to run private, local, open-source AI on your own hardware, with no cloud and no per-token bill required.

Different topics, same through line. You do not have to throw away what works to step into this era. You extend it.

Then Cisco Validated the Whole Thing

Here is the part that gave me chills.

On day one, Cisco unveiled Cloud Control, a platform where human operators and AI agents work side by side to run and defend critical infrastructure, and the foundation for what they are calling AgenticOps. Their framing of the shift was almost word for word the one we have been using: the move from the age of chatbots to the age of agentic AI.

When the largest player in networking gets on the biggest stage in networking and tells tens of thousands of engineers that agents are the operating model now, that is not competition. That is validation. The whole industry just agreed on the destination.

Why We Were Ready

And here is why I walked the show floor with a grin. The destination Cisco described is the road we have been paving.

Agents on their own are exciting and a little terrifying. A reasoning model that can take action with no guardrails is how you break a network at machine speed. The hard part was never getting an agent to reason. The hard part is letting it act safely, in production, across a hybrid estate of vendors and clouds and on-prem gear that does not all behave the same way.

That is exactly what Itential was built for. We were first to pair reasoning agents with deterministic automation and one governed execution engine, so an agent can reason through a problem and then hand the actual change to a workflow that runs the same way every single time, with pre-checks, post-checks, rollback, and a full audit trail. Human in the loop, on the loop, or in the lead. Your call, your thresholds. That is agents that reason and execute, with deterministic automation for governed hybrid execution.

We did not bolt agents onto an automation tool, and we did not bolt governance onto an agent framework. We brought them together, and we did it first. FlowAI hitting GA at the same show where the agent era went mainstream was not a coincidence. It was years of work meeting its moment.

It Was Always About the People

What I will remember most is not a product. It is the people. The citizen developers. The engineers who are quietly becoming agent builders. The folks who finally came out of their AI closet and joined the conversation.

If you missed the Lounge, the sessions are on-demand right here, and all of my code and slides from the week are out there for you to grab and run yourself. If you want to keep the conversation going, come find us in the VibeOps Forum. Every day someone is building something new, and there is room for you.

The agent era is not coming. It showed up in Las Vegas, and it is already running on real networks. There are no more excuses. Let’s build.