A networking giant just named the problem we've been building around

Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer, posted this after their keynote week: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeetupatel_we-are-at-the-beginning-of-one-of-the-most-activity-7469585414857687040-4mtk/

Most of it is silicon and platform news. One line is worth pulling out if you build ICM systems:

"every agent action will be a routing challenge, a trust decision and a telemetry event."

A $200B infrastructure company just said what's slowing agents down is a trust problem, not a capability one. Agents don't get adopted until something can vouch for what they produce. The whole field, top to bottom, is arriving at the problem the people in this community have been working on since day one.

What I want to flag is the crack in his own triad. Two of the three are infrastructure. Routing and telemetry get solved from outside the agent, and Cisco will happily sell you both. The trust decision is different. Their word for it is observability, meaning behavior monitoring, watch what the agent did. But watching what an agent did tells you nothing about whether its output should have shipped. You can log every step and still send a confident wrong answer out the door.

That gap is the opening for every ICM builder here. Observability makes a system readable. It doesn't verify anything. The part that holds the line is a gate at the point of action with the authority to refuse, and that gate depends on knowing what "correct" means for your specific work.

Which is exactly what a platform can't template. Cisco can build the dashboard. It can't decide, for your build, whether this particular output is honest. That decision stays judgment, and judgment doesn't commoditize when the infrastructure gets cheap.

So here's the possibility for this community: the biggest players are going to make agents observable. Very few are going to make them refuse. If your ICM system already has a real gate, a step that can say no and mean it, you're building the layer they just named as the frontier, at the one altitude a platform struggles to reach.

A question worth turning on your own build: take away everything that only makes it observable. What's left that can actually say no?

14 comments

A networking giant just named the problem we've been building around