Presented by Outshift by Cisco
AI agents are poised to transform how we work, but there’s a critical challenge ahead: getting them to work together effectively at massive scale. As organizations deploy thousands of AI agents across their operations, the need for a new kind of internet — the Internet of Agents (IoA) — has become increasingly urgent, says Vijoy Pandey, SVP of Outshift by Cisco.
“You’ll have agents sitting within all software, whether it’s business software, personal software, avatars on the social network or embodied AI sitting inside robotic entities and doing physical work,” Pandey says. “In the B2B context, all SaaS in the future is going to have multiple agents within it, agentic software from different providers coming together to talk to each other to solve a business outcome.”
This is why we need the Internet of Agents: an open, interoperable internet that will revolutionize how agents collaborate in a quantum safe way.
But doing that at scale is the central challenge, he says. It’s not just about the number of agents — an average-size organization will soon deploy upwards of 20,000 agents, and an enterprise could be handling hundreds of thousands. It’s about enabling them to communicate and interact effectively across vendor boundaries, security domains and profiles. This is why we need the Internet of Agents: an open, interoperable internet that will revolutionize how agents collaborate in a quantum safe way.
Building ensembles of agents
The IoA, powered by sophisticated LLMs and machine learning algorithms, needs to not only understand user intent but proactively act on it, communicate and seamlessly collaborate in a multi-agent framework, and stitch together workflows to execute a broad array of tasks across domains, all without explicit commands.
Each individual agent can be considered a subject matter expert — a master artisan even, in its own particular context and domain, Pandey says. The challenge is this: bringing each of these disparate, specialized agents together, in order to activate this future of collaboration and advance the power of agentic AI.
“A collection of these agents needs to come together, whether it’s a symphony or a trio, pick the right agents to solve for the problem at hand,” Pandey says. “How do you deal with that in communication and scaling out? There are issues of identity, trust, authentication. Then you think about planning and composition. Which skill sets do you need to bring together to build out your symphony or your quartet?”
While today’s internet excels at sharing data between humans and systems, AI agents need to share complex states, reasoning processes and make coordinated decisions in real-time.
This collaboration framework is fundamentally different from how current internet infrastructure works. While today’s internet excels at sharing data between humans and systems, AI agents need to share complex states, reasoning processes and make coordinated decisions in real-time — all while maintaining security and trust.
Each agent has a set of tools it can access, training and an inherent skill set driven by the LLM. It lives in an environment of data sources, institutional knowledge bases, techniques like RAG and dynamic database access, all of which need to be brought into the equation. And communication is now probabilistic in nature, after decades of deterministic software — and every agent may have its own language.
But even when the language hurdle is managed, every agent might interpret things differently, depending on its context. And finally, there’s a massive amount of state being exchanged, with multimodal agents exchanging video, images and text to manage an end-to-end workflow.
Why an open ecosystem remains critical
Pandey uses code development as an example of how a universal infrastructure and tooling for AI agents is critical. Generating and productionizing code is a laborious process, requiring syntactic checkers, semantic checkers, security agents, scaling agents and compliance agents before it hits production and runtime. A developer can pick the best of breed of these from various providers, stitch them together, build out code and push it to production.
However, these agents aren’t fully contained within one provider’s wheelhouse, and not even in each individual provider’s training and data set capabilities, because the developer’s code base and APIs are included in development. And that whole production needs to scale out in a trustworthy, scalable, explainable and secure way.
“No walled gardens, which means it maximizes value for every entity in that value chain. For the software developer, for the operator, for the customer and consumer.”
“All of these things can happen, and the best way possible is to build it in an open, interoperable manner,” Pandey says. “Because what does openness give us? No walled gardens, which means it maximizes value for every entity in that value chain. For the software developer in this case, for the operator, for the customer and consumer.”
Moving from closed gardens to open systems
Open ecosystems are the basis of technological progress. The internet began with proprietary systems like Solaris and Sun boxes and proprietary databases. But the internet actually took off when open source, open standard technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and the LAMP stack appeared. Cloud took off only when cloud native open-source ecosystems came about, like Kubernetes and Docker containers, and were adopted by everybody.
“For discoverability, reputation, identity, risk management, and communication. If you don’t have those things in an open standards way, then these things don’t communicate with each other. We will not have the Internet of Agents until that happens.”
“We’re at the same point here where yes, you can build proprietary systems, but if you want to expedite the development of agentic software, and if you want to expedite the way these pieces of software interact with each other inside an organization, all across various providers, the only way to do this is an open, interoperable way,” Pandey says. “Open source to drive the development of these pieces of software, and open source or specification-based outcomes for discoverability, reputation, identity, risk management, and communication. If you don’t have those things in an open standards way, then these things don’t communicate with each other. We will not have the Internet of Agents until that happens.”
But before agents collaborate with each other, organizations need to work together to build the specifications and standards that are needed in open source.
“We’re bringing together folks that believe in this vision. We’re starting to build this Internet of Agents and what it looks like,” Pandey says. “The call to action here is that whether you are a builder of software, a consumer of software, or an operator of software, please come together, because we want to build it the right way.”
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