May 15, 2026
Cisco Reports Record Revenue, Fueled by Enterprise AI and Agentic Security Demand
Cisco reported record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion in Q3 FY2026, a 12% year-over-year increase fuelled by enterprise AI infrastructure investment and a product portfolio that the company says has never been more relevant to its customers.
The headline figures confirm that organisations across every geography and customer segment are spending on the network and security infrastructure required to support AI-powered operations.
Total product orders grew 35% year-over-year, and even after stripping out orders from major cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, the figure was 19%. The company attributes that partly to pricing actions on hardware and partly to genuine acceleration in enterprise modernisation, with strength across every geography and customer segment.
Enterprise AI Readiness Is Driving Network Investment
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins attributed the demand to a combination of factors that converge on how enterprises plan to interact with customers and run AI workloads. Robbins said on the call: “We see customers now preparing for inferencing and agentic applications. In those cases, the network is incredibly important, and moving the bits around with low latency is super important, and customers are realising that they have to modernise.”
The company’s research across approximately 3,500 technology leaders showed 93% are accelerating network upgrades in response to AI-driven traffic expected to triple over the next three years. Organisations running contact centres and customer service operations need network layer as a foundation for hybrid work models, AI copilots embedded in agent desktops, and real-time analytics all depend on low-latency, high-throughput connectivity. Cisco’s own AI Readiness Index found that only 13% of organisations qualify as AI-ready, with infrastructure debt acting as the primary drag on progress, a finding that maps directly onto the demand Cisco is now reporting.
Zero Trust for AI Agents Targets the Governance Problem
The most consequential announcements for customer experience leaders came from the security side of the business. Cisco disclosed during the call that it intends to acquire Galileo and Astrix, two companies that will extend its platform into agentic identity, access management, and behaviour monitoring. The acquisitions come alongside DefenseClaw, an open-source solution announced in March that enforces guardrails on AI agents built using common frameworks, and a newly introduced concept Cisco is calling “Zero Trust access for AI agents.”
This is a direct response to a problem that any organisation deploying autonomous or semi-autonomous AI in customer-facing roles will need to solve, which is governing what those agents can access, what actions they are authorised to take, and how to detect when something goes wrong. Robbins confirmed during the call that over 1,000 new customers purchased products from the company’s newer security portfolio, including Secure Access, XDR, Hypershield, and AI Defense, in Q3 alone, bringing the total of net new customers to roughly 5,000 since launch.
Agentic SOC and Observability for Customer-Facing AI
The company also announced new agentic SOC capabilities designed to detect and respond to threats “at machine speed and scale,” along with observability tools built specifically for AI workloads.
In a contact centre context, where AI agents are handling customer interactions, processing sensitive data, and making decisions that affect outcomes, this kind of runtime monitoring and identity governance is not optional. Cisco had previously announced agentic AI solutions for its Webex and Contact Center platforms, including the Webex AI Agent and upgraded AI Assistant capabilities for contact centre supervisors and agents. The security infrastructure announced this quarter provides the governance layer required to deploy those tools with confidence in production.
Splunk Cloud Transition and Cisco IQ Launch
Splunk, Cisco’s observability platform, continues its transition from on-premise licences to cloud subscriptions, to create short-term revenue drag but long-term relevance for monitoring digital customer experiences and AI system health.
The company also launched Cisco IQ, an AI-powered services platform now generally available to more than 250 customers. The tool provides a real-time benchmark of Cisco assets and configurations, helping customers identify architectural vulnerabilities before they become operational problems. This function that has direct relevance for technology leaders managing complex multi-vendor environments in customer operations.
Alongside the earnings results, Cisco confirmed it would cut nearly 4,000 jobs as part of the restructuring, redirecting investment toward silicon, optics, security, and AI.
It is a pattern that has become prominent across the technology sector: record revenue and accelerating demand announced in the same breath as workforce reductions. Cisco’s CFO said the restructuring was “not a savings-driven restructure,” but the outcome is fewer people and more investment in AI.
