The Agentic Era Demands a New Data Foundation: How Cisco is Delivering It with Splunk

We are living through a massive inflection point. As of 2026, the mandate for technology leaders has shifted from simply showcasing AI’s potential to delivering tangible, measurable ROI from trusted AI. But if you look at the current landscape, we are hitting a wall: in our recently released research, Machine Data Outlook: Operationalizing AI in the Enterprise, 74% of respondents said AI and automation have created moderate or significant data-management challenges and 53% frequently or always lack the machine data needed for AI or automated decision-making.

For too long, the industry has operated under the assumption that you must bring all your data to your AI—moving massive, fragmented datasets into a single, centralized repository. That model is breaking. It is slow, cost-prohibitive, and can increase the risk of unreliable AI outputs when agents are working from siloed or incomplete data. When agents work from fragmented or insufficient operational context, they can produce confident answers that still miss the cause, business impact, or appropriate action.

Organizations need the flexibility to analyze data where it lives, connect signals across domains, and apply governed AI capabilities close to the data. In other words, organizations do not need to move all their data to AI. They need to bring AI capabilities to the data, wherever it resides.

At .conf26, we are sharing how Splunk helps customers turn distributed machine data into trusted operational context for AI. Leveraging the foundational data architecture in the Cisco Data Fabric powered by the Splunk Platform, we are helping customers analyze data where it lives at a lower cost, connect data in real time across domains, and transform machine data for model training and governed agentic action.

This is digital resilience redefined for the agentic era: transforming machine data into agentic action and delivering the data platform for trusted AI at scale.

Transform Data for AI

The most exciting frontier for us is the ability to deploy governed AI capabilities in environments that meet strict regulatory requirements. We know that for many of our customers in industries such as healthcare, finance, and government, their data will never leave their data centers.

With the introduction of Cisco AI POD for Splunk to the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, Splunk Enterprise customers can now bring the power of Splunk AI—with Splunk AI Assistant, hosted models, and Agent Launchpad—to their on-premises environment. Customers can choose from a selection of self-hosted models, including NVIDIA Nemotron open models in the coming months.

Splunk’s new AI runtime software and reference architecture provides a self-managed software layer for supported Splunk AI capabilities in customer-controlled environments. Cisco AI POD for Splunk pairs that software with pre-validated Cisco infrastructure and NVIDIA accelerated computing, providing a turnkey system that brings the power of AI directly into the data center.

Cisco AI PODs are foundational building blocks of the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, offering a full-stack modular infrastructure platform for enterprise AI.

Partners like bitsIO, Wipro and World Wide Technology are ready on day one to help customers stand it up.

Federate Data: Analyze Data Where It Lives

Machine data is skyrocketing but it remains trapped in silos across clouds, endpoints, and networks. Moving these petabytes into a single repository is cost-prohibitive and operationally draining.

Our approach is different.

AI-Powered Data Management helps prepare trusted data before ingest. Machine Data Lake retains machine data economically and promotes selected data when higher-performance analytics creates value. Federated Search brings Splunk analytics to supported third-party data sources without making migration the starting point.

Today we are extending Federated Search’s functionality to AWS CloudWatch Lake and Databricks, enabling customers to answer cross-domain questions faster while reducing unnecessary data friction.

Together, AI-Powered Data Management, Machine Data Lake, and Federated Search help our customers reach and analyze the data where it lives, reducing unnecessary movement and duplication.

Correlate at Scale: Connecting Data in Real-time Across Domains

Before we can reach, analyze, or correlate any data, we must first discover it. That's why we’re also prioritizing making data discovery easier by removing the need for specialized knowledge with the MCP-enabled Catalog Discovery highlighted today at .conf.

With our MCP-enabled Catalog Discovery we are helping both analysts and AI agents find the right data sets and understand their business context automatically. This is the difference between a broad, expensive search and a targeted, high-precision investigation.

Once data is discoverable, it must be connected to the signals around it. Cisco Data Fabric powered by the Splunk Platform enables our customers to not only access that context but turn it into trusted agentic action. Cisco customers can now get this same functionality through Cisco Cloud Control—no separate Splunk license required. It's a direct extension of the single-pane-of-glass view we announced at Cisco Live US this summer, now with a straight path to Splunk insights built in.

Aside from streamline access and workflows, Cisco customers with Splunk will see increased value from this enhanced interconnectivity.

By bringing in new network intelligence from Cisco SD-WAN, Firewalls, and Nexus and integrating them directly with Cisco Cloud Control, we are enabling our customers to move from isolated, fragmented alerts to a deeper understanding of cause and impact.

Cisco Deep Time Series Model accelerates forecasting and anomaly detection across operational environments by adding specialized machine-data intelligence without dedicated customer GPUs or data-science work. It is just the first in a series of future Foundation Models that will reason with the native shape of machine data.

Stewardship in the Agentic Era

We must address the economics of AI. We’ve heard the feedback loud and clear: AI productivity tools generate massive, opaque costs that often remain hidden until the invoice arrives. That dynamic must change, and it starts with us here at Splunk.

Today we’re announcing Activity-Based Pricing, expanding our current offerings of Value Insights and Integrated Enterprise Value announced earlier this summer.

Set to release this Fall, Activity-Based Pricing will align platform economics more closely to customer activity by weighting search and ingest equally, reducing cost and complexity while maintaining the power and functionality of the Splunk platform.

This addition and our recent summer announcements are about ensuring that as our customers scale, they do so with financial predictability and a clear line of sight to ROI: Value Insights connects Splunk consumption to operational value and optimization opportunities while Integrated Enterprise Value and included capacity for AI-powered Data Management, Machine Data Lake, and Federated Search gives eligible Splunk Cloud customers a lower-friction way to expand data use and prove value with clearer economics.

We’re doubling down on our commitment to be a partner in financial stewardship for our customers, not just a technical asset.

The Path Forward

The pace of change driven by AI is relentless, but it is also a powerful advantage for those who can trust their systems---which today, not many organizations can claim. Splunk is delivering the data platform for trusted AI at scale by turning distributed machine data into trusted operational context that helps people and agents understand what happened, why it matters, and what to do next.

The agentic enterprise isn't just a future state—it is happening today. We are honored to provide the foundation that helps our customers build it securely, resiliently, and confidently.

Find more on all innovations announced at Splunk’s annual .conf event in latest announcement, Cisco Delivers Trusted AI at Scale Through New Splunk Advancements and dive deeper into the latest innovations with the below news blogs and resources:

.conf26 Product & Partnership News Blogs

• The Agentic Era Demands a New Data Foundation: How Cisco is Delivering It with Splunk
• Cisco Empowers Organizations to Govern AI at Scale with Full-Stack Observability
• Evolving to Autonomous Defense: New Agentic SOC Capabilities
• Bringing the Power of AI to Where Your Data Lives: A New Milestone with Cisco and NVIDIA
• Splunk and AWS: Building the Agentic Enterprise Together

Additional resources:

• Splunk .conf press kit
• Cisco newsroom
• Splunk newsroom