Referring to last year as “a big turning point” in AI, Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins said 2026 is going to be even more monumental for the technology.

Speaking at Cisco’s second AI Summit today, Robbins said the company believes this will be the year of agentic applications, as the industry recognises how much things are about to transform.

“Whether we’re talking to our enterprise customers or governments around the world, we know we have to embrace this,” he explained. “Many of us believe it’s the biggest transition that we’ve ever seen … and I do believe this will be more revolutionary and it’s moving faster than we’ve ever seen.”

Partnerships and trust essential to AI growth

For the second Cisco AI Summit, the company has brought together what it calls “AI visionaries” to discuss where the entire AI ecosystem is heading.

“All of us in this room know that those of us who embrace AI will ultimately be the winners,” Robbins said. “We all know this moves fast and none of us can do it alone. Therefore, trust is really imperative.”

He added: “We’re really seeing the enterprise start to pick up. We’re doing this through partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, OpenAI, and many others … and we hope to be able to bring that to you as we move forward to bring not only the trust, but also the understanding of how AI is being deployed all around the world.”

Robbins’ comments come less than one week after he told the BBC that AI is going to “change everything”, warning that – despite business successes – there will be “carnage along the way”.

Urging workers to embrace AI, rather than fear it, Robbins said: “You shouldn’t worry as much about AI taking your job as you should worry about someone who’s very good using AI taking your job.”

OpenAI CEO: Codex app is another ‘ChatGPT moment’

Speaking today in his Frontier Models & AI conversations, CEO and co-founder at OpenAI Sam Altman said Codex is the first time he has “felt another ChatGPT moment” where there is a “clear view of the future of knowledge work and how enterprises and individual people are going to work in a completely different way”.

Launched yesterday, the Codex app is a new interface designed to manage multiple agents at once, run work in parallel and collaborate with agents over long-running tasks.

“The way developers work with agents has fundamentally changed,” the company said in its press release. “The core challenge has shifted from what agents can do to how people can direct, supervise and collaborate with them at scale.”

Now, Altman has said that “code plus generalised computer” use is even more powerful.

“Given an AI agent full access to your computer and your web browser with all your sessions leads to incredible stuff – and that seems here to stay,” he said at the AI Summit. “OpenAI did an incredible job of bringing many ideas together to make that feel useable and real. That seems certain to be part of our future.”

He imagined how AI agents could interact with each other and lead to new types of interactions, arguing a case for a new kind of social network – perhaps like Moltbook. During his fireside chat, he called for software to be optimised for AI agents to help make people more productive moving forward.

“The capability of AI feels to me the biggest it’s ever been,” Altman added. “We are planning for a world where demand will grow at an accelerated pace each year.

“Companies that are not set up to quickly adopt AI workers will be at a huge disadvantage. And it’s going to take a lot of work and some risk.”

Intel CEO on confronting AI challenges

Pivoting slightly, Lip-Bu Tan spoke about how he is looking to transform Intel and how the company plans to evolve in 2026 – including through its strong business partnerships.

“AI is advancing so fast … we’re delighted to see that customers want to engage with us,” he said. “But we are also focused on the 14A node, that will be very important for us. This is the most advanced node. We’re going to be in risk production in 2028.”

Tan identifies memory as the most significant challenge that is limiting growth – something that he sees continuing far into 2026.

“The AI wave is sucking up a lot of memory,” he explained. “If anything is going to slow down AI, it’s going to be memory.

To meet such immense demands, Tan said Intel needs to overcome a significant challenge – production.

“Compute has become very important. We also want to find new ways of liquid cooling because air cooling is not cutting it anymore,” he explained. “Data centres need a lot of power – so the question becomes, how can we scale?”

Tan also indicated that, in order to build CPUs and GPUs, Intel is looking at different materials to meet evolving AI requirements.

“We have to look at things a little bit differently – a lot of innovation,” he shared. “It’s important for us to have continued curiosity … we have to think about the end outcome we want and then go back to the foundation and keep ourselves accountable to improve enterprise productivity.”

His comments come shortly after his reported disappointment at Intel shares falling by 13% last week, after the semiconductor company struggled to meet the demands of rapidly growing interest in AI data centres.

“In the short term, I’m disappointed that we are not able to fully meet the demand in our markets,” Tan told analysts during a conference call, adding that the company was “working aggressively to grow supply to meet strong customer demand”.

Click here to read more coverage of the Cisco AI Summit

Related stories

Microsoft’s $360bn fallout: Is its OpenAI bet back-firing?

SpaceX acquires xAI for $125bn as Musk bets AI compute will move to space within 3 years

AI & 5G to cause telecom cloud market to experience ‘paradigm shift’