The Internet of Agents Vijoy Pandey, Ph.D January 22, 2025 Figure 6: Net-new products need to be built for the purple (Internet of Agents) layer, and existing products need to be extended for the blue (Internet) layer, driving a refresh across our portfolio Cisco needs to go back to its roots and drive the partnerships needed to ensure this is 17 open and interoperable, and fast-ship products as benchmark implementations. Incumbents always build walls, while challengers need to build bridges. There are some well-respected large partners, such as Meta and Apple, who should be goal-aligned to work with us on this thesis. There are also large incumbents (cloud providers, as well as FM providers) who would want to build walled gardens. The urgency behind the speed of this transition is also palpable. We initially started intro- ducing this topic internally back in April 2024. Since then, there have been many academic and industry papers in this space, including one from Outshift by Cisco AI/ML researchers (DAWN: Distributed Agents in a Worldwide Network), and some startups taking shape as 18 well . 17 The new Open is open source, though there is a need for a communication protocol that we may need to drive in the standards bodies, preferably IETF, as well. 18 Work by Ion Stoica and UC Berkeley, Tsinghua University and Tencent, DAWN by Cisco, talks by Amazon and IBM at Tech- Crunch Disrupt ’24, startups like Lyzr, and also LangGraph trying to extend into this space but currently very far from it. ©2025 Outshift by Cisco and/or its afÏliates. All rights reserved. 9