Cisco’s Jeetu Patel Says Agent Era Will Be Won on Context, Cost and Control at WebexOne

The event, which has long been used by Cisco to drive thought leadership in collaboration, served as a coming-out party for what the company calls the “new Cisco,” according to the report. Cisco has consolidated much of its historically sprawling portfolio into a single AI platform, with Webex positioned as the place where people and agents meet. The “One Cisco” story has been shared at Cisco Live and other events over the past year, but many Webex buyers were hearing it at this depth for the first time.

Patel opened his keynote by framing the market around five forces: agents are the new workforce, inference is the new workload, tokens are the new currency, trust is the new catalyst and control is the new moat. The underlying message was consistent with other presentations from Patel: if agents run everywhere, someone has to build and secure the infrastructure beneath them.

“We have moved from the age of chatbots, where we just asked questions of a model and got back answers, to agents that are now conducting tasks and jobs for us almost fully autonomously,” Patel said. “These agents act more like digital workers than like just a software tool.”

Patel also explained how Cisco arrived at this point. Six years ago, he said, Cisco “looked much more like a holding company than a platform company,” with roughly 250 acquisitions and siloed general managers. Webex Control Hub was the first platform experiment. Cisco Cloud Control, which he said came together in nine months, is now the management plane for everything Cisco sells, alongside Cisco Data Fabric for data and Silicon One for silicon.

“Over time, Meraki as a brand will be gone. Over time, Catalyst as a brand will be gone,” Patel said. “We will all be feature managers, not product managers, because all we’re doing is building features for the platform.”

The platform discussion laid the foundation for Patel’s argument that context, not the model, is the scarce resource. Every vendor has the same frontier models, according to the report, but what makes an agent useful is context: who is on the team and what was decided last week. Glean CEO Arvind Jain, who joined Patel onstage, said that without that knowledge, agents “work like a day-one employee.” He estimated that 80% of enterprise knowledge is buried in meetings, making Webex more strategic than the phrase “meetings software” suggests.

The most important Webex announcements focused on integrations. Claude in Webex, built on Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents, will let teams analyze data, generate content and act on shared context. A Model Context Protocol integration brings Webex context into OpenAI’s dots personal agent. Users can also invite agents into spaces, meetings and calls. Cisco is not trying to own the model, according to the report, but it is trying to own where the work happens. The company also has data from Splunk, security and networking, which provides an additional dimension into what users are doing and where they are located.

Patel said token budgets will become a line item and the network will feel it. Citing OpenRouter data, he said agent token consumption surpassed human consumption in February and is now five times higher. He also said that an agent consumes 450% more network bandwidth than a human performing the same task and that 60% of global compute this year will be used for inference rather than training.

“The costs of tokens coming down are nowhere near the demand going up,” he said. “So all of us are going to have a human budget as well as a token budget.” Patel told the audience that by the end of this month, every Cisco manager will know their token budget.

Jain called that unusual. “Technology is always supposed to be a fraction of the cost of your labor,” he said. “It cannot be like this forever.” Until that changes, agents that run around the clock reshape information technology cost models and network capacity planning, areas where Cisco has a clear interest.

On trust, Patel said the dynamic has moved from brake to accelerator. “Historically, in everything we’ve seen in tech, trust has never been a catalyst,” he said. “It’s always been an impediment to adoption.” Agents deliver value only when granted access to calendars, email and credit cards, which requires trust. He compared agents to teenagers: “They’re supremely intelligent. They have no fear of consequences.”

Patel’s broader message was that control is the new moat. If agents become digital workers operating across enterprise systems, the infrastructure that supplies context, secures access and manages cost will matter as much as the models themselves. Cisco is betting that Webex, combined with its data, security and networking assets, can be the layer where that work is coordinated.