Cisco has been a key partner and innovator in the service provider space for decades. And today that commitment continues as AI transforms connectivity, and telecoms face the daunting challenges — and vast opportunities — of this transformative technology.

This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the subject of unlocking AI value took center stage in a panel discussion led by Gordon Thomson, Cisco’s VP for EMEA service provider.

Thomson began by emphasizing the latest developments from Cisco in the SP and AI space, including new products like Agile Services Networking and AI Defense; the continued expansion of the Silicon One portfolio; and the company’s deepening partnership with Nvidia.

“As you’ve seen from our launches over the last few weeks,” Thomson said, “Cisco is really focused on the SP segment and very focused on AI infrastructure buildout. It’s about helping our service providers create a platform to be able to build new world digital services for the market space.”

To round out the discussion, Thomson was joined by two experts in the SP space: Colin Bannon, chief technology officer for BT Business, and Travis Ewert, global head of platform development for Digital Realty. Together they explored topics that included the impact of AI on networks, the need for agile, secure, and resilient data management, and the potential for AI to create new efficiencies and revenue opportunities for service providers.

Bannon began by sharing the latest on BT Group’s new cloud-centric Global Fabric platform — developed with support from longtime partner Cisco — which offers greater agility, resilience, security, and AI readiness. Because, as Bannon put it, everything from planes in the sky to patients on hospital beds (and so much more) depend on their networks.

“We needed to rethink how to do things in this world of increasingly distributed workloads, increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats, and the increasing importance of the network,” Bannon stressed. “Because there is no plan B now without the network. So, we needed to be more agile, and we needed to be much more resilient and much more secure.”

Global Fabric is all about convergence and simplification, and, of course, operational resilience.

“Hard downs are one thing, and you can engineer those out,” said Bannon, “slow is the new down. So, providing a service where you deliver outcomes of both assurance and security, but also end-user experience is going to be really important. Because we need to think about our mobile network, the convergence of the fixed network, and those outcomes.” 

Security in a complex ecosystem

Digital Realty is known for supporting and building high-density data centers and AI infrastructure around the world, so Ewert was quick to add his own thoughts on preparing for this challenging new AI era.

“The first story from the street so to speak,” he recounted, “was ‘hey, the networks aren’t big enough, scaled enough, secure enough, on demand enough to tackle some of these workloads and data exchanges.’ And not just for getting data to your model to train it, but even the day 2 and lifecycle considerations.”

Sharing “crown jewel” private data across third-party, AI-related clouds raises additional concerns.

“If you want to participate with AI, to leverage AI,” Ewert asked, “are you going to go put that on the internet or put it on an existing cloud infrastructure, something multi-tenant in nature?”

Digital Realty soon had a solution.

“All those conclusions for us then resulted in something we announced here a little over a year ago,” he explained, “our Private AI Exchange. It’s the notion of keeping the secure sovereignty, compliance, all that kind of stuff, and exchange pieces. To do this as an ecosystem where the data, the models, the training, the transformation, all those different things in that AI journey could be part of our fabric to get access to that in a private secured way.” 

Similarly, Ewert praised Cisco’s AI Defense, for which Digital Realty contributed development ideas. And he highlighted the timing of its release, just days after DeepSeek raised new security concerns around consumer AI.

“I’m going to give Cisco all the credit in the world,” he said.

AI innovation that’s ‘gold dust’ for SP opportunity

Above all, the discussion focused on just what AI can bring to service providers, in terms of efficiency, improved user experience, security, and so much more — all as complexity is surpassing the ability of humans to fully manage systems.

“You need more intelligence in the network,” Bannon stated. “And so, AI in the network is starting to do closed-loop remediation. Because AI is moving so fast now, our human brains can’t keep up. So, we need to now put some of this onto autopilot to be able to make course corrections faster than a human can do.”

As this evolution continues, building trust in AI will be critical to reap its full benefits.

“AI means giving up a little control,” Bannon continued, “but you need to put it into models that you can trust. Imagine if you can start to make changes outside of change windows. There’s huge value where you can do this with infrastructure — like some of the things that your Cisco teams are building where you can actually test the new code, have another version of the data plane still working in the device, and have AI look at all that. That is gold dust to a service provider.”

Building trust in partners — along with cooperation across the entire SP ecosystem — was another key theme.

“Nobody’s going to be able to do it on their own,” Thomson emphasized. “It’s going to take the power of many to be able to offer these solutions in the market space and it’s going to require an ecosystem to deliver those services to market.”

Ewert stressed that it’s a very fulfilling time to be working with service providers — to help them meet the challenges of AI, security, and more.

“We’re excited to participate in it, excited to partner with folks,” he said. “It’s maybe a once-in-a-career opportunity to embrace this and address it.”

Bannon agreed.

“For anybody who’s an engineer,” he stressed, “it’s one of the most exciting times to be living. Ultimately though, there’s huge responsibility on our shoulders. We’re running the critical services of nations, and we want enterprises to be super competitive. And in order to do that, they need brilliant connectivity, and they need connectivity that is relevant for the changing times. And therefore, as a service provider, now more than ever, we’re having to step up and be counted to have everybody’s back, but at the same time be super innovative and move at a speed we’ve never done before.”

Cisco, he added, is a big part of that.

“It’s great to see Cisco moving at a speed that I haven’t seen for many years in terms of the innovation,” Bannon concluded, “because it’s helping us actually deliver that. You’re providing the critical infrastructure for national critical infrastructures, and you’re providing the innovation for us to be able to do some really relevant things for this changing time.”