Building trusted AgenticOps to accelerate autonomous networks

Tom Foottit is Director Product Management, Provider Connectivity, at Cisco. He outlines some of Cisco’s biggest talking points at DTW Ignite, including how CSPs can achieve faster, more resilient operations through trusted AI, autonomous network capabilities, and a simplified approach to AgenticOps across multi-vendor environments.

TM Forum: What are the current priorities for CSPs that Cisco will focus on during DTW Ignite 2026?

TF: A key focus for Cisco is on advancing autonomous, intelligent and predictive network operations, while enabling service providers to bring innovative AI-driven connectivity and services to market faster through Cisco AI PODs.

Cisco AI PODs are designed to support the full technical lifecycle of AI deployments, including training, fine-tuning, and inferencing. They are based on validated architectural stacks and fabric designs, providing a blueprint for deployment that is referenceable and essentially “off the shelf.”

With growing interest in agents and agentic network operations, Cisco is also focusing on trusted AI with guardrails for agents, observability and monitoring, and validation of agent actions.

TM Forum: What is driving the urgency from CSPs to progress to higher levels of autonomy, and what are the key things to consider?

TF: It’s no longer just an efficiency project within the network operations teams; driving autonomy to the next level is a top business priority for CSPs to sustain and drive their businesses going forward. Their customers rely on networks for mission-critical business operations and, increasingly, to support AI workloads and intelligent agents.

CSPs need to be able to manage complex and rapidly changing networks at speed, predict and prevent network issues, and rapidly isolate and fix issues. Key foundational elements include observability across network domains, multi-vendor infrastructure, and a federated data platform with real-time device telemetry, network KPIs and more.

This can then be correlated and overlaid with contextual data from business operations to validate decisions. CSPs then have a solid base on which to build a generative or conversational UI for teams, an agentic framework, and autonomous decision-making capabilities. Multi-layer data intelligence, including network resource, service and business operations, is vital here. 

TM Forum: We are likely to hear a lot about AI and AgenticOps at DTW Ignite. Which use cases are actually gaining traction?

TF: We are seeing interest in agents that can handle deep network troubleshooting to solve difficult root cause analysis. In addition, certain agents not only proactively identify risk factors or outliers that could cause problems but are also able to remediate them, and automatically detect anomalies in network device configuration to prevent outages and security threats.

The future of agentic operations will be defined by an open marketplace of innovation, bringing together vendors, open-source contributors and CSPs creating their own intelligent agents. Agent-to-agent communication, open frameworks and robust agent development kits (ADKs) will play a pivotal role.

TM Forum: Thinking of the motto for the event, how is Cisco ensuring that CSPs will get to “The Future. Faster”?

TF: A key element of speed is simplicity. For instance, Cisco Crosswork provides a single platform for AgenticOps across the entire network and service lifecycle, including across domains and vendors. Cisco is focused on providing our customers with a simple and flexible AgenticOps capability that allows them to start their autonomous network journey quickly and expand rapidly.

TM Forum: Cisco is taking to the stage twice during DTW Ignite. Can you explain what it plans to focus on there, and why?

TF: We will be joining BT on the main stage for The Autonomous Service Provider session, where we will explore how service providers can advance to the next level of autonomy and why this is becoming a strategic priority for both operational resilience and business growth.

We will also discuss how CSPs can build trust in autonomous operations through embedded security, comprehensive observability and validation of AI systems and agents working alongside operations teams.

In addition, our security expert will participate in the panel AI Security: Secure AI and AI Cyber Resiliency in the Agentic Era, sharing Cisco’s latest thinking and innovations in AI Defense, agent observability and monitoring. As AI adoption accelerates, ensuring the security and resilience of these environments remains a critical priority for service providers.