Scaling Intelligence Out: Cisco's Vision for the Internet of Cognition, with Vijoy Pandey

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
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 each did for this episode demonstrates why this is such an important opportunity. 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 that 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 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 that 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. This kind of concentration of capabilities into just a few systems, and the concentration of power that it could easily bring about, has always struck me as dangerous. And 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. I think and hope it could give rise to a more buffered, ecological, and stable network-based architecture for AI. Importantly, Vijoy also argues that this paradigm gives enterprises what they really want and need. 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 through 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 that they call the Community AI Platform Engineer, or CAIPE, 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 some 40% of tasks. Meanwhile, for the public, they've taken the lead on the Agency Project, which you may recall from past sponsorship is spelled AGNTCY, and which is laying an open-source foundation for how AI agents representing different interests can connect, communicate, and meaningfully collaborate.
At one point in this conversation, Vijoy fires up a demo, which shows how four agents, each representing different organizations and specializing in distinct skills, can collaborate to serve a patient in a health care 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 have found anywhere. With Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco. Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco, welcome to the Cognitive Revolution.

**Vijoy Pandey** (4:23)
I'm so excited to be here, Nathan.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:24)
Me too. Lots to learn. I've been studying up on your work and there's many facets to it. I would love to start, if you would indulge me for a second, with just a super high level view. I think everybody in America knows the brand Cisco, but probably even a lot of people who are very into the AI world at this point and know a ton about the intricacies of post-training and building all these agent workflows. If you pressed them and said, what does Cisco do? What I've come to in terms of a three-word answer is, moving information around the world. And that, how do we say, has many different ways to unpack it. But I'd love to just get your introduction to the company and the fundamental role that it plays in our modern technology life.