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Cisco Live US 2026 kicks off May 31 in Las Vegas. In Episode 3 of Built to Scale: Secure AI Factory, Alim H. Ali sits down with Rajeev Khanolkar and Matt Locknane for a preview of the most important topics, announcements, and trends heading into the show, and what every Cisco AM, buyer, and operator should be tracking before walking the floor.
What we get into:
- The Secure AI Factory in plain English: an on-prem AI factory you own, with control over tokens, costs, and security from prompt injection guardrails through Isovalent at the Kubernetes layer to Splunk observability
- Cisco’s silicon-to-software story: why differentiation has moved to the software layer, and how Secure AI Factory wraps security around developer velocity
- Why Cisco’s Q3 earnings are being driven by AI infrastructure, and why owning your AI factory protects IP and tokenomics (the “Uber ran out of tokens” problem)
- Secure AI Factory at the edge: low-latency inferencing for manufacturing and computer vision, mining, oil and gas, and healthcare imaging
- Where Splunk fits: out-of-the-box observability across GPUs, Cisco Intersight, Red Hat, and Kubernetes, plus Splunk Enterprise Security
- Isovalent + Cisco + Splunk together: application dependency mapping in Kubernetes, MCP server visibility, and Cilium CNI encryption that preserves visibility under quantum-era pressure
- The Cisco 360 Partner Program and Secure AI Factory as the “partner opportunity of 2026,” and what the Secure AI Factory specialization means for the customer conversation
- The pilot-to-production gap: 28% of orgs say their infrastructure can handle AI, yet 75 to 85% of enterprise AI workloads are now inferencing, and why most enterprises stall at scale-out (“spaghetti AI”)
- Local intelligence vs. hyperscalers: data sovereignty in regulated industries, the surprise cloud bills, and why hybrid is here to stay
AI Defense for the agentic era: the MCP scanner, prompt and response guardrails, and how proxy vs. API modes change the security conversation - What’s flying under the radar at Cisco Live: Isovalent, plus the networking, observability, and zero trust innovations Rajeev and Matt will be watching (Nexus 9100, Silicon One, Hyperfabric, Nexus Dashboard Insights, Splunk, zero trust networking)
- Where to find Gruve at Cisco Live: AI Village, plus how AMs and customers are accelerating Secure AI Factory deals with the Gruve team
Catch up on the series:
