If 2025 was the year of the pilot programme, 2026 is officially the year of the ultimatum.
Yesterday’s Cisco AI Summit wasn’t a product launch; it was a council of war. Bringing together the CEOs and chief technologists from NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Intel, and Anthropic, among others, the event stripped away the marketing veneer to reveal the stark plumbing of the next industrial revolution.
The consensus from the stage was brutal in its clarity: the era of “playing” with AI is finished. We are moving from chatbots to “agentic infrastructure,” and for the enterprise, the margin for error has just evaporated.
Here is our dispatch on the ten critical realisations that defined the summit.
1. Matt Garman, CEO at AWS
The “PoC Purgatory” exists because of bad planning, not bad tech.
Garman noted that many AI projects stall simply because teams don’t set well-defined success criteria up front. He also shot down the “space-based data center” hype, stating bluntly that “there are not enough rockets” to make orbital compute economical yet.
2. Jeetu Patel, President & CPO at CISCO
The era of human-written code is ending.
Patel revealed that 70% of Cisco’s code is now generated by AI and predicted that by the end of 2026, the company will have products where 100% of the code is AI-written, shifting engineers from “writers” to “reviewers.”
3. Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft
The interface of the future is “no interface.”
Scott argued that we are moving past the “chatbot” era into the “ambient intelligence” phase, where AI anticipates needs without a prompt. He warned that enterprises building for “chat” are already building legacy tech; the goal now is building for “observation and action.”
4. Amin Vahdat, Chief Technologist for AI Infrastructure at Google
Infrastructure decides winners.
Vahdat’s core message was that the model wars are a distraction. The real bottleneck is the “choke points” of energy, network latency, and data movement. He stated that in 2026, your AI strategy is only as good as your “topology”—how fast you can move photons, not just how smart your weights are.
5. Lip-Bu Tan, CEO at Intel
Supply chains become strategy.
Tan highlighted that the race for intelligence will be won or lost at the chip packaging level. He argued that “Sovereign AI” isn’t just about owning the data, but owning the manufacturing capacity to process it, positioning silicon independence as a boardroom-level risk metric.
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6. Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI
The workforce divide is permanent.
Altman stated, “AI won’t replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don’t.” His focus was on “agency”—moving from assistants that talk to agents that execute complex workflows over long time horizons.
7. Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO at NVIDIA
“Sovereign AI” is the new national defense.
Huang argued we are transitioning into the age of the “AI Factory,” where a country’s token generation capacity will be directly proportional to its economic prosperity.
8. Chuck Robbins, Chair & CEO at CISCO
2026 is the year of the “Agentic Reset.”
Robbins warned that companies failing to prepare their infrastructure for autonomous agents will face a “trust gap” that breaks their business model, calling it a complete “reset of the rules.”
9. Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic
We are entering the phase of “Vibe Coding.”
Krieger highlighted that as models become reliable, the barrier to building software dissolves. The next leap is models that can “plan agentically,” making the ability to code less important than the ability to describe a problem clearly.
10. Dylan Field, CEO at Figma
Execution stops being the moat.
Field argued that when anyone can build instantly, the real competitive advantage becomes taste. In a world of infinite generated content, knowing what not to make is more valuable than knowing how to make it.
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