Cisco Live: Aruna Ravichandran on Trust, AI Agents, and the Next Era of Networking
Release Date: 06/05/2026
Building Evidence Based Trust for AI Agents With Vijil
Tech Talks Daily
What evidence would convince you that an AI agent is ready to make decisions involving employment, money, healthcare, or legal rights? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Vin Sharma, founder and CEO of Vijil, about the trust gap preventing many enterprise AI agents from progressing beyond proof of concept. Vin has spent approximately 30 years building software across security, operating systems, open source, cloud computing, machine learning, and AI. His previous work includes leading engineering at Amazon SageMaker and helping develop 11 AWS AI services. He argues that AI agents...
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Securing Mobile Work Without Putting Data on the Device With Hypori
Tech Talks Daily
What if employees could access sensitive business applications from personal phones without storing company data on those devices? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Jared Shepard, CEO of Hypori, about virtual mobile infrastructure, BYOD security, employee privacy, zero trust, and the growing mobile threat created by AI. Jared’s personal story deserves attention in its own right. He describes himself as a former homeless high school dropout who joined the Army, discovered an aptitude for IT, and applied what he learned to difficult technology problems in Iraq and Afghanistan....
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Turning Payment Terms Into Strategic Working Capital With Calculum
Tech Talks Daily
Could your company be paying suppliers earlier than its competitors and unintentionally financing their advantage? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I welcome back Oliver Belin, co-founder and CEO of Calculum. Our previous conversation took place around ten years ago when Oliver was working with the Marco Polo Network and blockchain was attracting attention across trade finance. His latest venture concentrates on working capital, payment terms, and the role of AI in supplier negotiations. Oliver explains why working capital has moved higher on the agenda for procurement, treasury, and...
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Could Disease Chemistry Help Treat the Brain With Enabled Therapeutics
Tech Talks Daily
What if the chemistry created by neurological disease could help activate medicine precisely where it is needed? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Sara Isbell, neuroscientist and co-founder of Enabled Therapeutics, about a proposed approach to one of medicine’s most stubborn problems: delivering effective drugs to diseased brain tissue without exposing healthy areas to the same activity. Sara explains how the blood-brain barrier prevents many promising compounds from reaching the brain. When drugs do enter, they may spread across healthy and diseased regions alike, creating a...
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Preparing Unstructured Data for Enterprise AI With CTERA
Tech Talks Daily
Could the real reason enterprise AI projects remain stuck in pilot mode be hidden inside the company’s unstructured data? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I welcome back Oded Nagel, CEO of CTERA. We discuss why enterprise AI success depends on the condition, location, permissions, and business value of the data sitting underneath models and agents. Oded defines AI-ready data as information that is searchable, classified, and permission-aware. Many enterprises have petabytes of files distributed across offices, edge locations, legacy network-attached storage, and cloud platforms. Before...
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Quillbot on How Is AI Changing the Way People Think at Work
Tech Talks Daily
What happens to the value of human judgment when AI makes execution faster, cheaper, and available to almost everyone? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Eric Wang, Vice President of Product and AI at QuillBot. Eric has worked in artificial intelligence since 2006, with previous leadership roles at Turnitin and Chegg. He now works on AI products used by millions of people to develop ideas, improve their writing, conduct research, and create new forms of content. Eric argues that AI’s workplace impact extends far beyond automation. These tools are changing how people develop an...
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Industrializing AI: How Enterprises Turn AI Into Measurable Business Value
Tech Talks Daily
Has enterprise AI finally reached the point where impressive demonstrations are no longer enough? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Bruce McMahon, Chief Product Officer at CallMiner, about what he describes as the industrialization of AI: the move from experimentation and excitement toward repeatable processes, measurable ROI, better customer experiences, and technology that can operate reliably at enterprise scale. Bruce explains why business leaders are increasingly asking a much simpler question about AI: how is this going to create value? Drawing on CallMiner's experience...
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AI Agent Security: Why Identity and Access Control Matter More Than Guardrails
Tech Talks Daily
What happens when an AI agent is compromised, manipulated, or simply does something nobody expected, but already has permission to access your most sensitive systems? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Geoffrey Mattson, CEO of SecureAuth, about why securing enterprise AI requires businesses to think beyond protecting models and start paying much closer attention to identity, authorization, access control, and what AI agents are actually allowed to do. Geoffrey argues that AI agents present a different security challenge from traditional software. Conventional applications can be...
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Is Your Network Holding Back Your AI? Kentik CEO Avi Freedman on AI Infrastructure
Tech Talks Daily
Companies are spending billions on GPUs, data centers, foundation models, and AI infrastructure. But what happens when the network connecting all of it cannot keep up? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I welcome back Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik, five years after our previous conversation. Avi has been operating large-scale networks since the 1990s, including more than a decade at Akamai, and brings a rare combination of founder experience and hands-on knowledge of how the internet actually works. We discuss why network performance is becoming an important factor in...
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What Clarecast Data Reveals About AI and Quiet Restructuring
Tech Talks Daily
Is AI really causing widespread job losses, or are a small number of announcements creating a much larger narrative? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Marvin Pohl, chief data scientist and cofounder of Clarecast, about AI layoffs, quiet restructuring, predictive workforce intelligence, and the responsibility that comes with forecasting company growth. Marvin’s career began in physics and physical chemistry. After completing his PhD in Germany, he worked at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley before moving into data science at BASF. He describes how his role changed as generative AI...
info_outlineWhat happens when the newest users on your network aren't people at all?
At Cisco Live, I sat down with Aruna Ravichandran, SVP and CMO for AI, Networking, and Collaboration at Cisco, to discuss a shift that could change how organizations think about networks, operations, and AI over the coming years.
For decades, enterprise networks have been built around human behavior. People work predictable hours, take holidays, and generally follow familiar patterns. AI agents are different. They work continuously, analyze information around the clock, and increasingly act as digital teammates that can help organizations monitor, troubleshoot, and improve operations at a scale that would be impossible for humans alone.
During our conversation, Aruna explained why AI is no longer just an application discussion. As organizations deploy more digital teammates, networks must support a new type of user that never sleeps, never stops learning, and can help identify issues before employees even arrive at work. We explore Cisco's vision for AgenticOps, the role of Cisco Cloud Control as a unified command center, and how AI-driven operations are helping reduce complexity for teams already overwhelmed by alerts, dashboards, and operational overhead.
Aruna also shared her perspective on one of the biggest challenges facing the industry today: trust. While the technology is advancing rapidly, organizations need confidence that their digital teammates can make reliable recommendations and support critical operations without removing human oversight. That balance between automation and accountability sits at the heart of Cisco's approach.
We also discuss why domain expertise still matters in the age of AI, how Cisco is drawing on decades of networking experience to build purpose-built models, and why the next few years may see every IT professional supported by an expanding team of digital coworkers.
If you've been wondering how AI will move beyond chat interfaces and become part of everyday operations, this conversation offers an interesting look at where networking, automation, and AI are heading next.
How many digital teammates do you think you'll be working alongside in the next few years, and what tasks would you trust them to handle first?
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