Scaling Intelligence Out: Cisco's Vision for the Internet of Cognition, with Vijoy Pandey
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today my guest is Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco.
For more than 40 years, from helping to define early low-level protocols that are still in use today, to building out the infrastructure that powers modern high-speed networks, Cisco has been critical to how we manage the flow of digital information, and today Vijoy and the team at Outshift, are bringing Cisco's distributed systems DNA to the fundamentally new challenges presented by frontier, agentic AI systems.
The AI-powered preparation that Vijoy and I did for this episode demonstrates why this is so important. I used Tasklet to conduct deep research on Vijoy's work and draft a starter set of questions, and at the same time his team ran a deep research process on me and the podcast, and identified a number of suggested discussion topics based on themes we've previously explored. Both agents did a really good job on their respective assignments, but they knew nothing about one another and they had no opportunity to collaborate. Their output was sent from human to human, by email, and it was up to me to figure out how to synthesize their work.
What's missing, Vijoy says, is "The Internet of Cognition" – higher-order protocols and infrastructure that AI agents need to share context, understand one another's intent, build reputation and establish trust, and ultimately solve problems in shared spaces.
The upside of filling this gap, I'm convinced, will be world-changing and perhaps even world-saving.
It was, of course, the emergence of language and the evolution of culture that allowed humans to sustain cooperation over long distances and time horizons and ultimately build the global civilization we enjoy today.
And the distributed nature of this system makes it extremely difficult and rare for any individual to accumulate a systemically dangerous amount of power.
In contrast, the current AI paradigm emphasizes scaling things up, with more and more resources creating ever-more powerful frontier models, each of which is meant to do everything on its own.
Such concentration of capabilities into just a few systems, and the concentration of power it could easily bring about, has always struck me as dangerous, so I think it's very exciting to see a major company developing an alternative paradigm that's meant to scale intelligence out horizontally, in a way that is fundamentally distributed and designed to support permissionless participation from the start, and which could give rise to a more buffered, ecological, and stable network-based architecture for AI.
Importantly, Vijoy argues that this paradigm gives enterprises what they really want – a way to grant agents only the minimum permissions truly needed to perform their roles, a clean separation of concerns, visibility and auditability of their systems, and controlled interfaces though which to interact with the outside world.
Of course, this conversation goes well beyond the theory and deep into the progress that Cisco and its partners are making in practice.
Internally at Cisco, they've built a system they call the Community AI Platform Engineer, or CAPE, which is composed of 20 distinct agents that collectively manage complex cloud computing environments. This system has reduced load on site reliability engineers and improved response times for end users by fully automating 40% of tasks.
And for the public, they've taken the lead on the AGNTCY project – which, you may recall from past sponsorship, is spelled A-G-N-T-C-Y – which is laying an open-source foundation for how AI agents, representing different interests, can connect, communicate, and meaningfully collaborate.
At one point in the conversation, Vijoy fires up a demo which shows how 4 agents, each representing different organizations and specializing in distinct skills, can collaborate to serve a patient in a healthcare setting that spans diagnostics, insurance, pharmacy, and scheduling. He narrates the demo pretty effectively, but I think it would be worth flipping over to YouTube to see that bit in action if you can.
With that, I hope you enjoy this window into some of the most sophisticated systems thinking about the giga-agent AI future that I've found anywhere, with Vijoy Pandey, of Outshift by Cisco.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz