Every vendor event has a center of gravity, and at theCUBE Research’s AI ROI in Contact Center Summit, it wasn’t a product. It was a metric this industry is finally ready to abandon. I co-hosted the summit recently with Bob Laliberte (pictured, left), principal analyst at theCUBE Research, and spoke with executives from Cisco Systems Inc., Five9 Inc., Zoom Communications Inc., Talkdesk Inc., and Converged Technology Professionals, an implementation partner.
In Denver this week, Cisco Systems Inc. and its Splunk unit made a bet that the scarcest resource in the agentic enterprise isn’t intelligence or graphics processing units — it’s trust. The Splunk .conf 2026 show themes and keynotes focused less on dashboards, widgets and features and more on who or what is authorized to act in the agentic era. Every vendor conference typically has a center of gravity that serves as a unifying theme.
For the past two years, the generative artificial intelligence boom has largely been defined by a single market. Hyperscalers have dominated the market with massive capital spending. According to CreditSights, the five largest U.S. hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc. and Oracle Corp. — are on pace to spend roughly $700 billion to $800 billion in capital expenditures this year, with about three-quarters of that spending tied directly to AI infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence dominated headlines and keynotes at every event I’ve attended this year, including the recent Cisco Live 2026. Though the thirst for AI has been insatiable for a couple of years, customer feedback at the event showed that the era of AI curiosity has given way to AI urgency. Information technology and business leaders are no longer satisfied with conversational chatbots or basic AI scribes that merely summarize meetings or draft text. They want systems that proactively identify and resolve problems across their massive, complex IT estates.
At Cisco Systems Inc.‘s annual event, Cisco Live, this week in Las Vegas, it was no surprise that artificial intelligence was the top theme of the show and dominated most of the news and product innovations announced. Cisco has been successful in riding the AI wave and using it as a growth engine. Over the past year, revenue and profits have grown, and the stock price has doubled. The company has accomplished this by positioning itself as “critical infrastructure for the AI era” and by revamping its entire product line to back that claim.