- Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins sees network capacity requirements exploding as AI demand spreads from data centers to campus, branch and deskside
- Cisco's Cloud Control platform could give telcos a ready-made operational foundation for delivering enterprise-grade AI infrastructure services
- Cisco knows more about telco customers than telcos do, analyst Zeus Kerravala said, and can partner with them for mutual business advantage
CISCO LIVE 2026, LAS VEGAS — AI will drive geometric increases in network demand, driving new business and new revenue streams for telcos, according to top Cisco executives.
"It's not a stretch for the [telco] business model. It's not some new muscle they have to learn," said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins at a Q&A session for press and analysts Tuesday. Cisco has estimated that network capacity requirements will triple in three years, and that might be conservative, he said.
Telcos have prime real estate for AI
Opportunities go beyond connectivity, Robbins added. Central offices, which serve as mini data centers, are prime real estate that telcos will find the means to monetize. Some telcos are considering just leasing space in those facilities to solution providers, while others will actively partner to build stacks with companies like Cisco to provide inferencing services.
Secure global connectivity is another prime opportunity for service providers, said Cisco CPO Jeetu Patel. "The volume increase on network infrastructure is not just going to be limited to data centers," Patel said. Campus and branches will see "huge uptick in volume" as well.
Exploding networking requirements extend literally to the desktop — or, more precisely, the deskside. Users are installing agents like OpenClaw on Mac Minis and Mac Studios, and those agents need to communicate with other deskside agents around the world, across campuses, branches and in data centers.
"That productivity fabric is going to be more and more important," Patel said.
He added, "Our engagement with service providers has only increased over the course of the past couple of years — in fact, while we are sitting here, I've received texts from a service provider who's interested in doing some very interesting stuff with us."
Cisco knows the telco customer — and telcos should use that
Historically, Cisco gained competitive differentiation by having both service provider and enterprise businesses, and being able to bridge the two, Robbins said. Now, Cisco has added cloud providers to its portfolio. "Differentiation is going to start to reemerge because we can stitch those solutions together and help on the go-to-market side," he said.
Indeed, Cisco should double down on its cross-industry expertise to benefit telcos, Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, told Fierce. "In theory, telcos should play a very important role. There's no reason why they can't be the ones providing the models and AI tools to customers — especially to smaller businesses."
But there's a catch. "I don't know if customers fully trust them, and if they've got the operational model to build those things," he said. "This is where partnership with Cisco could pay dividends."
In the early days of the internet, Cisco had a program called Cisco Power Networks, where Cisco brought its enterprise expertise to help telcos build networks that could deliver internet service to enterprises, Kerravala said.
"I'd like to see Cisco doing something similar in the AI era," Kerravala said. Cisco could help telcos build infrastructure to enterprise requirements and tune services to different types of customers, optimized for performance, cost and other requirements based on customer needs.
"Cisco understands the service provider's enterprise customer better than the service provider does, and that's where a lot of the value can be provided," Kerravala said.
Fierce's take
Cisco used this week's Cisco Live conference to launch Cloud Control, a unified management platform that brings together its networking, security, compute, observability and collaboration products under one login for human operators and AI agents to manage infrastructure together. For telcos looking to move beyond connectivity into AI infrastructure services, Cloud Control could provide a ready-made operational foundation — giving service providers the cross-domain management, security and observability stack they need to deliver enterprise-grade AI services.
AI is challenging networks worldwide. Inference traffic is spreading from centralized data centers to edge environments and putting new latency and routing demands on infrastructure. Telcos can help meet those demands, as noted in a recent research report from F5. Telcos are positioned to evolve beyond connectivity into AI infrastructure hosting, offering compute, routing and sovereign cloud services.
Land, power and connectivity are bottlenecks slowing data center expansions in the U.S. and internationally, and telcos are rich in all three assets. They have only to seize the opportunity.
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