If a resistance had AgenticOps, maybe the stars would have stayed peaceful.

This May the 4th, I am thrilled to announce that Galaxy Mode is live inside the Cisco AI Assistant across both Meraki and ThousandEyes. A starfield drifts behind the prompt. The assistant speaks in a manner that’s familiar to anyone taking on empires…or enterprises. Hidden, the surprises are. Find them, you must.

The Cisco AI Assistant your team talks to every day…just got a lot more fun to talk to—and a lot more formidable.

Galaxy Mode runs from today through June 4. One month. Limited engagement. We built it to honor the people who keep the modern world running. The ones who hold the digital fabric of the enterprise together, so everything else holds together too. Galaxy Mode is our way of saying thank you in a language a certain kind of fan will recognize on sight (say hello to C-C1E).

Underneath the starfield, the work is serious. One conversation with Cisco AI Assistant is enough to feel the agentic horsepower already humming inside. Capabilities that have been shipping. Capabilities that have been growing faster than most teams realize.

The quiet rebellion of agentic AI

For decades, network operations had a particular soundtrack. Pages at 2 a.m. Bridge calls. The mechanical click of someone tabbing between 14 browser windows trying to correlate a packet capture with a BGP route with a firewall rule to resolve a customer ticket. The work has been nothing short of heroic. It has also been exhausting, but quietly, a small rebellion has been brewing against it.

That rebellion now has a name: AgenticOps. This is the resistance. Fighting outages, complexity, and an AI deluge that never slows.

Make no mistake: we have entered the AgenticOps era of networking. Not an upgrade. Not an evolution. A full-on reset of the operating model. The kind of shift that rewrites what “network management” means. Networks that reason. Systems that learn. Infrastructure that acts in context. Humans to guide and oversee.

I have seen this from both sides. First in engineering trenches, building systems and shipping code and debugging at 2 a.m. like everyone else. Now, from a chair, I get to watch those systems grow into something genuinely autonomous. The arc has been remarkable, and the rate of change is accelerating.

If AgenticOps laid the foundation last year, what is happening this year is the hyperdrive kicking in. Image-aware troubleshooting. Workflow creation by conversation. Generative UI. Deep Reasoning. Agents that handle the work no one used to have time for. The pieces are converging fast, and Cisco AI Assistant is where most of our customers will feel that convergence first.

Tasks that used to take weeks now take days. Tasks that used to take days now take minutes—with reasoning your teams can see, question, and trust.

Galaxy Mode is our way of pulling you into the cockpit.

What Cisco AI Assistant actually unlocks

Start with Galaxy Mode…but stay and explore what’s humming underneath.

Agentic, end-to-end troubleshooting. Picture the long arc from “something is wrong” to “something is fixed” collapsing into a single conversation. No tab graveyards. No copy/pasting MAC addresses between tools. The path from alert to resolution travels through one window, with the Cisco AI Assistant walking beside you—pointing, narrating, suggesting—and when you give the nod, executing. Your copilot has the star map memorized.

Capabilities, surfaced. AI-RRM. Intelligent packet analysis. AI config recommendations. These have been quietly powerful inside the platform—but for a lot of teams, they have been buried one menu too deep to find on a busy Wednesday. Cisco AI Assistant pulls them up to eye level—all activated simply by asking. Hidden firepower, finally in the open.

Agentic Workflows creation. Agentic Workflows is a cross-domain low-code/no-code automation tool built directly into the Meraki dashboard. Starting today, you can now describe what you want to the Cisco AI Assistant the way you would describe it to a colleague at a whiteboard. The system listens, drafts a plan, hands it back for your approval, and then builds the workflow for you, executable within the Cisco AI Assistant. Auditable, deterministic, reusable, and yours to refine. Use the words, build the thing. Intent becomes execution. Automatically.

Beyond the outer rim

We are giving a sneak peek of beta capabilities for the Cisco AI Assistant within Meraki. If you are reading this and you want in, get on the list here.

Image upload—analyzed. Upload a screenshot of a dashboard you are squinting at. A whiteboard photo. An architecture diagram. The Cisco AI Assistant reads what it sees and helps you act on it. For the field engineer building labs. Junior admins debugging networks. Anyone who has ever stared at a wiring photo wondering what am I looking at—this is for you. Translation services for the chaos.

Deep Reasoning mode. Earlier generations of AI surfaced events; Deep Reasoning interprets them. It analyzes signals across domains the way a veteran engineer does, sensing how a misconfigured policy in one corner sends ripples three hops away, watching for the cascade before it cascades. And it shows its work—the chain of reasoning is visible, so your team can see why it reached the conclusion it did. It investigates disturbances with higher accuracy before they escalate and become war rooms.

This is what NetOps looks like when teams stop reacting and start orchestrating. When the war room dissolves because the war never began.

A note on where this came from

Galaxy Mode started as a sketch on a marketing whiteboard. Bold. A little audacious. A little nerdy in the best possible way. It worked because the product team picked it up and ran with it.

When the engineers building the future and the storytellers giving it shape pull on the same rope, features become moments. Launches become memories.

How to try it

Open Meraki or ThousandEyes. Click the Cisco AI Assistant icon in the top-right corner of the dashboard. The starfield will be there waiting.

Ask it something you would normally click through five screens to find. Bring it the gnarly issue from last week you never quite closed the loop on. Upload that photo of the whiteboard that has been haunting your team’s group chat. Spend ten minutes. Notice where it surprises you. Notice where it does not. Both signals matter to us. And remember it’s a mode—you can switch back and forth between default and Galaxy mode any time you want.

Then come back and tell us what you found. Comment below or on LinkedIn. Tag us in the screenshots. The whole month is the demo. The best discoveries always come from the people closest to the work.

Galaxy Mode is here through June 4. The agentic era of networking is here for good.

The Cisco AI Assistant is ready. Go ask it something.