Cisco says agentic AI is driving a networking supercycle as enterprise orders jump
The networking giant booked $1.3 billion in AI orders from enterprise, neocloud and sovereign buyers, up 150 percent, and says agent workloads are behind a campus refresh that has barely started.
Cisco closed its fiscal year on Wednesday with record results and an unusually direct claim about what is driving them. "We believe the accelerating adoption of agentic AI is fueling a networking super cycle," chief executive Chuck Robbins told investors, according to an Investing.com summary of the earnings presentation. Fourth-quarter revenue came in at $17.3 billion, up 18 percent year on year, with adjusted earnings of $1.22 per share, and Channel Dive reports full-year revenue reached a record $63.3 billion.
The AI order book is the number the agent industry should read. Hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders hit $9.3 billion for the fiscal year, a roughly 4.5-fold increase, per Investing.com. More telling for the enterprise market: orders from neocloud, sovereign and enterprise customers reached $1.3 billion, up about 150 percent year on year. The enterprise figure is small beside the hyperscaler line, but its growth rate says corporate agent deployments are graduating from pilots to infrastructure requests.
The refresh is reaching the office floor, not just the data center. Campus networking orders set a record in the quarter, up 20 percent, and management said only 7 percent of the campus switching install base has been refreshed so far, with Wi-Fi 7 now more than half of wireless mix, per Investing.com. Channel Dive reports the drivers Cisco named include agent inference workloads that need new network architecture, plus security concerns that followed published reports of rogue agent breaches. Robbins framed the on-premises question as a win either way: "If they continue using cloud-based models, that benefits us. If they move to open-weight or on-premises models, they invest more in enterprise private data center networking," he said, per Channel Dive.
For agents-as-a-service vendors, Cisco's quarter is a demand proxy one layer down. Production agent fleets generate machine-to-machine traffic, constant tool calls, and east-west flows that campus networks built for humans browsing were never sized for. When a company that sells switches attributes a record year to agentic AI, it is measuring deployments that customers have budgeted, not ones they are merely piloting. Cisco is also building its own position in the agent stack, including the model routing work GaaS News covered earlier this summer.
The market took some convincing anyway. Shares fell 4.6 percent after hours as guidance pointed to gross margins of 65 to 66 percent, down from 66.3 percent, on a heavier hardware mix, per Investing.com. Enterprises, in other words, are paying for agent readiness in low-margin metal before most of their agents have proven a return.