As enterprises accelerate adoption of autonomous AI systems, Cisco agentic workforce security is becoming a central focus in addressing emerging risks tied to AI driven operations and decision making.
At the RSA Conference 2026, Cisco announced a broad set of security innovations designed specifically for the agentic AI ecosystem, where software systems are no longer limited to responding to inputs but are actively executing tasks. The company aims to remove key barriers to AI adoption by embedding security across the lifecycle of AI agents, from identity and access control to runtime protection and threat response.
“AI agents aren’t just making existing work faster; they’re a new workforce of co-workers that dramatically expand what organizations can accomplish,” said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco. “Projects shelved for lack of resources are now within reach. The only limit is imagination, and security teams are the key to unlocking this opportunity by making the agentic workforce safe enough to trust.”
According to Cisco, while 85 percent of enterprise customers are experimenting with AI agents, only 5 percent have deployed them in production, largely due to security concerns. To address this gap, Cisco is focusing on three core priorities, ensuring agents act as intended, protecting agents from external manipulation, and enabling security teams to detect and respond to threats at machine speed.
A key element of the announcement is the extension of Zero Trust Access to AI agents. Cisco is introducing capabilities that allow organizations to establish verified identities for agents, map them to accountable human owners, and enforce strict, context aware access controls. These enhancements are integrated into Duo IAM and Cisco Secure Access, enabling visibility into agent activity and governance across enterprise environments.
“Organizations are eager to embrace AI, but they need to do so without creating security coverage gaps. Cisco’s Zero Trust Access for AI agents gives visibility into agentic identities and restricts access to exactly what’s needed,” said Jeremy Nelson, CISO North America, Insight.
“In this dynamic agentic tech environment, strict access control for AI agents is critical but challenging to enforce consistently with legacy tools designed for human users. This creates uneven enforcement and blind spots, leading to gaps that agents in an agentic world will inevitably exploit,” said Fernando Montenegro, Vice President & Practice Lead, Cybersecurity & Resilience, Futurum. “Cisco’s platform approach is well-positioned to address these challenges by modernizing tooling to ensure consistent, adaptive security for AI agents.”
Cisco is also expanding its AI Defense portfolio with the introduction of AI Defense Explorer Edition, a self service solution that enables organizations to test and validate AI models before deployment. The platform supports adversarial testing, evaluates resistance to prompt injection and unsafe outputs, and provides actionable security insights for compliance and risk management.
In addition, Cisco introduced an Agent Runtime Software Development Kit that embeds policy enforcement directly into AI workflows during development. The company also unveiled the LLM Security Leaderboard, offering transparency into model risks and susceptibility to adversarial attacks, helping organizations make informed decisions about AI deployment.
To further streamline secure development, Cisco launched DefenseClaw, an open framework that integrates multiple security tools into a single environment. By automating processes such as code scanning and asset inventory, DefenseClaw enables organizations to maintain zero trust security while accelerating AI deployment.
Cisco’s security vision extends to the security operations center as well. Through its Splunk platform, the company is embedding AI into SOC workflows, introducing capabilities such as Exposure Analytics, Detection Studio, and federated search. These tools, along with specialized AI agents, aim to reduce alert fatigue and enable faster, more effective threat response.
“The evolution of the security operations center from reactive to proactive is now a necessity in today’s threat landscape. By introducing specialized AI agents, Cisco is empowering analysts to move beyond manual triage and prioritize the most important threats quickly,” said Ryan Morris, President, Blackwood.
As organizations move from experimentation to production, Cisco agentic workforce security reflects a broader industry shift toward securing AI as a foundational component of enterprise infrastructure. By integrating identity, governance, and real time defense, Cisco is positioning itself to help enterprises scale AI adoption while maintaining trust, control, and resilience.
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