Cisco’s Vijoy Pandey highlighted a critical limitation in current AI systems, noting that while AI agents can be integrated into workflows, they lack the ability to think together, which serves as a bottleneck for next-generation AI development. According to Pandey, for agents to truly collaborate, they need to achieve “shared cognition,” allowing them to work cohesively without human intervention. This vision aligns with Cisco’s broader goal of creating an “internet of cognition,” where AI agents can share intent and context to foster collective innovation. To support this next-level infrastructure, Pandey’s team is developing new communication protocols as part of their AGNTCY project, which aims to enable seamless collaboration between AI agents while integrating them with various existing platforms to enhance efficiency in development workflows.

Cisco: Cisco develops infrastructure for networking, security, and emerging technologies through its Outshift division, which incubates solutions for agentic AI and quantum systems. Outshift builds open frameworks like AGNTCY to enable AI agent discovery, collaboration, and observability across platforms. In recent discussions, Cisco highlighted internal use of AI agents for site reliability engineering and introduced protocols for shared cognition among agents.
Vijoy Pandey: Vijoy Pandey is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Outshift by Cisco, directing efforts in agentic AI and the Internet of Cognition. He leads development of protocols enabling AI agents to share semantic states, latent spaces, and compressed cognition for distributed superintelligence. Pandey recently explained how current agent workflows lack true collective thinking, advocating for infrastructure that mimics human cognitive evolution.

AGNTCY Project: Cisco’s open source AGNTCY framework standardizes AI agent discovery, identity management, secure messaging, and observability for interoperable collaboration.
Internet of Cognition: Outshift by Cisco envisions an open infrastructure where AI agents share intent, context, and reasoning to achieve collective innovation.
Enterprise AI Integration: Cisco deploys in-house and third-party AI agents integrated with security platforms to automate development workflows like CI/CD pipelines.