Cisco to roll out AI agents for all 90,000 employees

Cisco Systems is launching one of the largest artificial intelligence rollouts in the history of corporate America. Starting at the end of July 2026, coinciding with the beginning of the company's new fiscal year, each of its 90,000 employees will get access to a personalized AI agent capable of performing tasks, answering questions, and routing queries to the most appropriate model.

Behind the project is Mark Patterson, Cisco's chief financial officer since July 2025, who previously spent 26 years at the company in roles spanning finance, strategy, operations and sales. As Fortune described it, Patterson views the current AI wave as the biggest technological shift of his career.

Architecture over frontier models

A key element of Cisco's strategy is moving away from reflexively using the most expensive, most advanced language models for every task. The system dynamically matches the model to the specific task, which is meant to optimize both performance and operating costs.

We're not going to burn a whole bunch of tokens with frontier models - Mark Patterson, Cisco CFO

A significant part of the infrastructure runs on Cisco's own servers rather than on external cloud providers. The company argues this approach gives it greater control over both costs and the data its agents process.

AI in the finance department

Patterson himself mainly uses an agent for benchmarking, comparing Cisco's results against competitors on revenue growth, earnings per share, R&D spending and capital allocation. Regulatory filings, however, are the area where automation has gone furthest.

According to Cisco, AI already generates 80-90 percent of the first draft of the Management Discussion and Analysis section, the mandatory part of publicly traded companies' financial reports. A separate tool analyzes the company's financial history and competitors' statements from earnings calls, trying to anticipate specific analysts' questions ahead of results releases.

A dashboard for the CFO

Cisco also plans to build a so-called CFO cockpit, an AI dashboard meant to synthesize company performance data broken down by product, geography and customer segment, then forecast business direction and recommend specific actions to management.

The company does not disclose the cost of the AI rollout itself separately from its standard earnings reports. What is known is that orders tied to AI infrastructure from major cloud providers are expected to nearly quadruple year over year, from $2 billion to $9 billion.

What this means for companies in Poland

The scale of Cisco's rollout, coming from one of the world's largest network infrastructure providers, signals the direction large tech corporations are heading: instead of single AI tools for select teams, companies are starting to treat agents as standard equipment for every job. For Polish companies weighing similar deployments, Cisco's cost model is worth noting, one built on proprietary infrastructure and selective model choice rather than heavy reliance on the most expensive cloud solutions.

Cisco is pairing the rollout with employee upskilling programs and internal knowledge-sharing, hoping teams will compete to find new uses for the agents. The company also highlights its own expertise in designing custom chips, optical networks and security for AI infrastructure, which it says sets its approach apart from competitors that buy off-the-shelf cloud solutions.

Investors are already pricing in the effects of this strategy. Cisco's stock rose 53 percent in 2026, making the company one of the beneficiaries of the AI investment boom, even though it doesn't produce language models itself but rather the networking and security infrastructure for the data centers that run them.

Sources: Cisco is rolling out AI agents to every single one of its 90,000 employees (fortune.com), Every one of Cisco's 90,000 employees now has an AI agent. Its CFO explains the cost (sea.peoplemattersglobal.com)