Building AI Trust To Cover Your Biggest Security and Observability Blind Spots

A Sneak Peek at One of Cisco Live 2026’s Most Anticipated Center Stage Sessions

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how we build applications, how we run infrastructure, and how we defend our organizations against threats. But here's the uncomfortable truth – the same AI capabilities that are accelerating your business are also expanding your attack surface in ways that traditional security and observability tools simply weren't designed to handle.

At Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, Splunk is bringing this conversation to the front and center. In one of the event's center stage sessions, Trust & Compliance in the AI Era: Keeping Infrastructure, Systems, and Apps Secure and Compliant, we're going to show you what a modern, trustworthy operating model actually looks like when AI is woven into the fabric of your organization. Spoiler: it doesn't involve crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Why We’re Excited To Be at Cisco Live 2026

Cisco Live has always been the place where practitioners gather, not just to watch keynote slides scroll by but to dig deep into the technology decisions that keep their organizations running. That's exactly the kind of audience that energizes our speaker, James Hodge, VP of Global Specialists, who will be taking the stage for this session.

Practitioners are already wrestling with urgent questions. How do you govern AI agents you've deployed? How do you know when they're behaving in ways you didn't intend? How do you stop a breach in a cloud-native environment where the blast radius is measured in minutes, not hours? This Cisco Live center stage session is the room where those questions get answered with real solutions, not theoretical frameworks.

For James and the broader Splunk team, Cisco Live 2026 isn't just another industry conference. It's a moment in time when agentic AI, Cisco technologies, and Splunk solutions are converging into real and tangible outcomes for customers.

The One Thing We Want Every Cisco Live Attendee To Know About Splunk

If you can only take one thing away from this post, or from the session itself, let it be this:

Security and observability can no longer be separate disciplines. In the AI era, they must be handled seamlessly together.

For years, security operations and platform engineering teams have operated in parallel universes. SecOps watched for threats. SREs watched for outages. The data they needed often lived in the same places, but the workflows, tooling, and organizational structures kept them apart. That model is breaking down, and AI is a big reason why.

When an AI agent starts drifting from its intended behavior, is that a reliability problem, a security problem, or both? When network traffic anomalies begin correlating with unusual endpoint activity, do you want your security team to find out about it after the breach or before? When a cloud-native service is trending toward an outage, do you want a reactive engineering team or do you want proactive, intelligent automation that has already scaled the resources?

These aren't hypothetical scenarios. They are the operational realities that Splunk and Cisco are solving together, right now. The Splunk platform, powered by the Cisco Data Fabric, gives your teams the unified visibility and intelligent automation they need to move from being manual responders to proactive orchestrators. That shift, from reactive to proactive, is what trust and compliance in the AI era actually looks like in practice.

Why You Should Be in the Room

Let's be direct about what you're going to take from this session. James Hodge and the team have structured the content around three concrete, real-world capabilities that you can start thinking about applying to your own environment the moment you leave the room.

1. Autonomous Agent Performance Monitoring

AI agents are being deployed across enterprises at a pace that's outrunning governance frameworks. What happens when an agent drifts — when its behavior degrades or deviates from the outcomes it was designed to deliver? In this session, you'll see how to monitor AI agents for performance degradation using Splunk's AI Agent Monitoring capabilities, ensuring your autonomous systems stay consistent, trustworthy, and aligned with your business objectives. Protecting your AI agents from the world (and protecting the world from your AI agents) requires observability built specifically for this new paradigm.

2. Proactive Security Operations

The traditional security operations model is reactive by design: wait for an alert, investigate, respond. That model is insufficient when adversaries are moving faster than human analysts can triage. This session will show you how to correlate network traffic anomalies with endpoint logs in ways that let you stop a breach before data is exfiltrated — not after. With Cisco AI Defense integrated with Splunk, security teams gain a unified view of threat signals across network and endpoint telemetry, enabling the kind of early intervention that makes the difference between a near-miss and a headline.

3. Infrastructure Stability in Cloud-Native Environments

Cloud-native architectures are powerful, but they're also complex and volatile. Predicting a service outage before it impacts end users requires more than dashboards — it requires intelligent telemetry analysis and automated remediation. You'll see how Splunk's observability capabilities can detect trends in infrastructure telemetry and trigger automatic resource scaling before performance degrades. This is what it means for infrastructure teams to operate proactively rather than reactively in a cloud-native world.

These aren't lab demos — these are production environments, real challenges, and real outcomes. And that’s why you’ll want to be in the room.

Session Details and Resources

Session: [CENOBS-1199] Trust & Compliance in the AI Era: Keeping Infrastructure, Systems, and Apps Secure and Compliant

• Speaker: James Hodge, VP of Global Specialists at Splunk

Be sure to add this session to your Cisco Live schedule because center stage sessions fill up fast, and this is one you won't want to experience secondhand through a recap video!

While you're planning your Cisco Live agenda, here are a few additional resources to help you go deeper on the themes covered in this session:

• Explore Splunk AI solutions and how Splunk is building artificial intelligence and machine learning into the platform.

• Learn about Cisco AI Defense, how it connects to Splunk Enterprise Security, and how it extends your security posture for AI applications and agents.

• Read about Splunk Observability Cloud and unified telemetry for cloud-native environments.

• Discover the Cisco Data Fabric, powered by Splunk Platform for the next generation of intelligent operations.

The Bottom Line: Proactivity Is Imperative

We are at an inflection point. AI is already here, it's operational, and it's generating new categories of risk that demand new categories of response. The organizations that will thrive in this environment are not the ones with the most tools or the largest security teams. The most successful companies will be the ones that build an operating model where intelligence, automation, and unified visibility allow their people to stay ahead of what's coming, not chasing what has already happened.

That's the world Splunk and Cisco are building toward together. And, at Cisco Live 2026 Las Vegas, you'll get to see what it looks like in practice. Come ready to ask questions and leave with a clearer picture of what trust and compliance in the AI era actually requires.