The Summer of Turbulence: How AI Is Rewriting Infrastructure Operations

The Summer of Turbulence: How AI Is Rewriting Infrastructure Operations

This episode is part of a seven-part sponsored series with Cisco focused on the technologies defining the next era of enterprise networking, with new episodes released each month. Networking is entering its "summer of turbulence." Frontier AI models can now identify and exploit vulnerabilities in massive, decades-old codebases faster than traditional security and operations teams can respond. Cisco's Tom Gillis and Murali Gandluru join Nick Lippis to discuss what that means for the future of infrastructure operations. The conversation explores the shift from centralized monitoring to distributed, agent-driven visibility, why infrastructure teams will need to adopt CI/CD-style software lifecycle operating models, and how organizations can keep pace with a growing wave of AI-discovered vulnerabilities. Tom and Murali also demonstrate how Cisco is approaching the challenge through technologies such as Cisco Cloud Control, Nexus Dashboard, and Live Protect. They also examine the organizational changes that come with AgenticOps, from evolving NOC and SOC responsibilities to rethinking how infrastructure teams manage risk, change control, and lifecycle management. The discussion concludes with a look at digital twins, smart switches, autonomous operations, and the path toward infrastructure that can increasingly manage and protect itself. New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified.

AI Changed the Network: Inside the Ethernet Fabric Powering AI Infrastructure

AI is pushing networking into territory it has never seen before. In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis sits down with Hasan Siraj, Vice President of Products at Broadcom, to talk about how AI workloads are rewriting the rules of Ethernet, optics, and data center architecture. They dig into why AI traffic is fundamentally different from traditional TCP/IP traffic. Think massive elephant flows instead of self-balancing streams, and what that means for load balancing, congestion, and reliability at scale. Hasan breaks down the three distinct networking challenges AI infrastructure demands: scale up, scale out, and scale across, and why each requires a different approach. On the hardware side, Hasan walks through Broadcom's latest silicon, including the Tomahawk 6, the only 100-terabit switch in production today, and explains why co-packaged optics are achieving reliability 10x better than pluggable alternatives. For enterprises watching from the sidelines, Hasan makes the case that the same innovations powering hyperscale AI clusters are now accessible at the scale most organizations actually need. New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified.

Hybrid AI Infrastructure and the Rise of Non-Human Identity

Agents don't log in. They connect. And that changes everything about access control. In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis sits down with Tom Gillis of Cisco and Robert Kim of Presidio to discuss hybrid AI infrastructure and the operational challenges no one has fully solved yet. They explore why on-prem AI is becoming practical for enterprises that can't easily retrofit their data centers for liquid cooling, how Presidio built an agent framework that lets users switch between cloud and private models, and why Ethernet is emerging as the preferred fabric for enterprise AI infrastructure. Tom draws a direct line from infrastructure to security: agents have the access footprint of a human but none of the judgment, and today's access control frameworks weren't built for that. The network, he argues, is where non-human identity has to live and the only enforcement point organizations can truly rely on when agents begin operating at scale. Want to go deeper? Watch the related on-demand AI Networking Summit session, Hybrid AI Infrastructure and Agentic Ops Security in Practice: https://hubs.li/Q04jpjxF0 [https://hubs.li/Q04jpjxF0] New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified.

The Token Economy: eBay's Build vs. Buy Playbook for AI

eBay has been running its own private cloud for decades. So when AI spending started accelerating, the calculus didn't change. It got more complicated. In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis sits down with John Feldmeier, CIO at eBay, to talk about what a build-first philosophy actually means in the age of AI. They discuss why eBay is doing both, buying to move fast and bringing things in-house as usage scales, and what token economics looks like in practice when budgets are finite and model choices matter. John also addresses the tension showing up everywhere right now: boards pushing for speed, security teams pumping the brakes, and finance asking hard questions about ROI. And why, ultimately, the hardest part of AI adoption isn't the technology. It’s bringing people along with it. New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!

From Observability to Reasoning: How AI Is Transforming Network Operations

Traditional tools can detect problems. They can’t reason about them. That gap is becoming one of the biggest challenges in enterprise network operations. In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis sits down with David Mann, Global Services Leader at NetBrain, to discuss what AI-driven network operations actually looks like in practice. They explore why context and intent are foundational to effective automation, how standard changes and runbooks become the training ground for autonomous agents, and where human oversight still matters before organizations fully take humans out of the loop. Nick and David also get into the infrastructure question many enterprise teams are facing right now. As AI workloads reshape traffic patterns and operational complexity, what breaks first, and how should teams rethink network design for the next era of enterprise infrastructure? New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!