- AT&T is in talks with Cisco and others about edge compute services as enterprise customers request local AI inference for the first time in a decade
- AT&T demonstrated AI Grid with Cisco and Nvidia at its Dallas Discovery District in March, pointing to surveillance and perimeter monitoring as early edge AI use cases
- Post-quantum cryptography is a priority
CISCO LIVE 2026, LAS VEGAS — For the first time in a decade, AT&T is seeing enterprise customers ask about edge compute, and AI inference is the reason why.
Andy Foerstner, AT&T GM of strategic managed services, said the shift is a first in 10 years. For most of that period, edge compute was a solution looking for a problem: technically feasible, commercially unviable.
"Edge compute has been a use case without the market opportunity to support it for a very long time," Foerstner said. "For the first time ever, we are now seeing additional conversations with customers leading to requests to provide local instances for language models."
He added, "We don't have a productized offer. Right now we're trying to listen to the market, listen to the demands that the customers have, and integrate that with the overall AT&T value prop, which is bringing converged connectivity to those solutions to give optimal reliability."
Edge or neocloud?
The central unresolved question is where enterprise AI inference should run. Does a customer need compute on their own premises, or is a neocloud — a GPU-as-a-service provider like CoreWeave — close enough?
"There isn't a clear definition of what the benefits are for customers in regards to that shift from near cloud and far cloud for certain instances," he said.
"I don't think anybody's really landed on the perfect use case for any of this, and it's different for manufacturing than it is for retail than it is for transportation — but everyone's starting to think about it for the first time historically, Foerstner said."
Cisco's top executives at this week's conference made the case that AI is a major opportunity for telcos. CEO Chuck Robbins said network capacity requirements could triple in three years and pointed to central offices as prime real estate for inference services. Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel noted that demand will not be limited to data centers — campuses, branches and even desksides will see significant volume growth.
Intelligent Edge and the Cisco partnership
AT&T is partnering with Cisco for network edge connectivity. The Intelligent Edge initiative is designed to bring AT&T's converged access and connectivity onto a single device with a flexible ecosystem of network functions on top.
The pitch is a migration path rather than a rip-and-replace. Customers can start with Layer 3 routing, then add SD-WAN, security via AT&T's SASE partnerships with Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, and network observability through Cisco ThousandEyes — all without returning to the physical site, Foerstner said.
"We can meet customers where they are with their Layer 3 routing needs, but then we can transition them further up the stack into more capabilities, either on day one or the evolution of their enterprise," Foerstner said,
Foerstner's Strategic Managed Services unit covers SD-WAN, universal CPE with network functions virtualization, SASE and Wi-Fi — with the latter provided via Cisco Meraki and HPE Aruba Central, with additional options in the pipeline. "Think of it as a LAN, WAN and security continuum of capabilities, with the whole goal of trying to meet customers where they are," Foerstner said.
In March, AT&T and Cisco demonstrated an implementation of Cisco AI Grid with Nvidia at AT&T's Dallas Discovery District, using Linker Vision cameras and Nvidia compute to monitor common areas in near real time for spills, obstructions and perimeter anomalies. AT&T also described a commercial pilot with TanMar Companies, a Louisiana-based oilfield services firm, deploying the platform for license plate recognition and perimeter monitoring across industrial sites.
Post-quantum cryptography: Cisco's 8000 series as the foundation
AT&T is also leaning into post-quantum cryptography (PQC) through its Cisco relationship, specifically around the Cisco 8000 series routers, which Foerstner described as the furthest-ahead hardware solution in the market for the PQC challenge.
"Right now there isn't anybody else who has a similar approach to PQC with the onboard hardware acceleration capability that the 8000s have," he said.
The U.S. federal government has set a 2030 deadline for FIPS 203 compliance, which Foerstner expects to be a significant driver for both government and defense industrial base customers. Cisco plans to release software version 26.2 in August, which will enable PQC support across deployed 8000 series routers.
AT&T's interest in PQC is consistent with the broader security push at this week's conference. Among a broad range of Cisco announcements, Cisco debuted post-quantum cryptography roadmap expansion across its core portfolio, committing to quantum-safe communications across the majority of its products by December 2026. The threat model — adversaries collecting encrypted traffic today to decrypt once quantum computing matures — is being taken seriously across the industry.
AT&T has invested heavily in the underlying infrastructure that makes all of this possible: $22 billion last year in fiber and $23 billion acquiring spectrum from EchoStar. That investment is beginning to be deployed in new ways, Foerstner said — though the precise nature of AT&T's edge compute offer remains a work in progress.
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