Cisco Podcast Network

Cisco has been running agentic systems for more than 18 months. Our biggest lessons weren't about models. They were about data, governance, and human judgment. So, how did we do it?

In this episode of Scaling AI in the Enterprise, our expert panel takes you inside Cisco's own AgenticOps transformation. Learn why scale and machine-speed threats make it essential now and what to get right before you start, and why your orchestrator can't be an oracle.

Host: Jack Hampson, Director of Product Management, Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

Guests:

Bhaskar Jayakrishnan, SVP of Engineering, Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

Carlos Pereira, Fellow and Chief Architect, Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

Dr. Lydia Chilton, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

Sam Charrington, Host of the TWIML AI Podcast

Learn more about Cisco Customer Experience; Read our blogs and visit Cisco.com

Ian's training for a marathon (well now ran it...), Kat's got an AI agent basically stalking her own accounts, and somehow they still end up debating handwriting.

But for real, they're picking up where last week left off—actually using AI at work, not just talking about it. We're talking morning briefings, customer tracking, mining meeting notes for the action items you definitely missed because you were scrolling, and the question that matters: "What am I not seeing?"

Kat walks through the prompts that are actually saving her time, Ian has a minor revelation about what he could be doing with his meeting summaries, and his refrigerator calendar? Come for the shenanigans, stay for the real, relatable help with using AI.

Check out AI solutions for SMBs here: https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/solutions/small-business/ai-enabled-networking/index.html

Ian and Kat set out to talk about AI this week. They do not talk about AI. Instead, they end up defending their sweatshirts, debating when your camera actually needs to be on, and wrestling with a surprisingly heated question: can you protect a lunch break, or will someone always schedule right over it?

Kat's settling into a global role now, which means early mornings, late night (sounds like a good name for pilates sock company...) calls, and the special kind of calendar Tetris that comes with trying to find a meeting slot across three continents. Ian admits he's way too quick to shuffle his own time around to make life easier for everyone else...and yeah, he knows that's probably a problem.

Then they dig into the real stuff: how to actually be available without being always available, the unwritten rules of WFH life, and whether any of this is sustainable. The AI conversation? That's genuinely happening next week. Probably.

In the pluggable optics industry every next generation is led by countless presentations and proposals at standards bodies meetings along with lots of lab development and testing behind the scenes. Right now the industry has its sights set on 3.2 terabit transceivers with 400 Gb per electrical lane. All those meetings and all that testing are happening as we speak.

Today I am joined by John Calvin, Strategic Planner and Datacom Technology Lead at Keysight.

John has been bridging the measurement science gaps of emerging telecom and datacom development efforts for 20 years. He has chaired multiple physical layer interoperability working groups and is currently serving as a contributing member to IEEE 802.3, OIF-CEI, InfiniBand, and PCIe development efforts. John holds a BSEE from Washington State University, and his graduate level studies are in signal processing from Stanford University.

In Episode 67 we continue our conversation with John. We get into how equalization, forward error correction, and increasingly sophisticated signaling keep Ethernet scaling.

John has very generously made himself available for your follow-up questions. You can find him at IEEE 802.3 technical forums or you can email him at john.calvin@keysight.com.

Please follow the Cisco Podcast Network on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! Better yet, leave a review on Apple podcasts. Remember you're listening to the Cisco Optics Podcast, which is part of the Cisco Podcast Network where you can find other great Cisco podcasts too.

If you want to listen on a website, go to optics.podcastpage.io.

We also have educational videos on youtube. Just go to youtube.com and search on Cisco Optics.

Related links
Cisco Optics-to-Device Compatibility Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/
Cisco Optics-to-Optics Interoperability Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/iop
Cisco Optics Product Information: https://copi.cisco.com/

Additional resources
Cisco Optics Podcast: https://optics.podcastpage.io/
Blog: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog
Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen
Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics

Intro music
Music by Sergio Prosvirini from Pixabay

Outro music
Dreamers by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com
Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com

In this episode Robin Olds interviews Bradley Cain, General Manager of ERC Broadband, about the destruction Hurricane Helene caused in Western North Carolina and how ERC responded. Brad describes the physical damage to fiber, power and facilities, the team and partner efforts to restore service, and how network design (rings and layer‑3 routing) helped reduce customer outages.

They also discuss leadership, organizational culture, and practical lessons for disaster preparedness—stocking supplies, securing fuel, and keeping spares—plus ERC’s views on AI, growing symmetric bandwidth needs, and the evolving role of community networks as critical infrastructure.