Descriptions:
Nathan Labenz of the Cognitive Revolution podcast interviews Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco, on what Pandey calls the “Internet of Cognition” — a proposed stack of higher-order protocols that would give AI agents the ability to discover each other, establish identity and reputation, share context, and collaborate across organizational boundaries. Pandey draws on Cisco’s four decades of distributed systems work to argue that the current industry focus on scaling up monolithic frontier models needs to be complemented by scaling intelligence out horizontally through open, permissionless infrastructure.
Cisco has already deployed this thinking internally through CAPE (Community AI Platform Engineer), a 20-agent system that manages complex cloud computing environments. CAPE has automated 40% of routine SRE tasks and improved end-user response times by offloading incident response from human engineers. For the broader ecosystem, Cisco is leading the AGNTCY open-source project (spelled AGNTCY), which aims to establish foundational protocols for inter-agent communication, trust negotiation, and shared context.
A live demo walks through four agents representing different organizations — diagnostics, insurance, pharmacy, and scheduling — collaborating in a healthcare scenario without any human coordination layer. The conversation also covers agent identity, semantic and cognitive network layers analogous to OSI layers 8 and 9, and why enterprises specifically benefit from minimum-permission agent architectures with clean audit trails. This is one of the most technically grounded public discussions of distributed agentic infrastructure from a major enterprise networking company.
📺 Source: Cognitive Revolution “How AI Changes Everything” · Published March 25, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
