Cisco announced Cisco Unified Edge, an integrated computing platform designed for distributed artificial intelligence workloads. The platform combines compute, networking, storage, and security into a unified system deployed closer to where data is generated, such as retail stores, healthcare facilities, and factory floors. Cisco positions the offering as foundational infrastructure that can support both traditional IT tasks and emerging agentic artificial intelligence workloads that require low-latency inference at the edge.
The company framed the launch around widespread infrastructure constraints. According to the announcement, more than half of today’s artificial intelligence pilots are stalling because existing centralized architectures cannot meet new performance and data locality demands. The edge is described as the new artificial intelligence frontier, with a forecast that 75 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed at the edge this year. As workloads shift from centralized model training to real-time inference, traditional data centers are increasingly unable to accommodate the operational and networking needs of these applications.
The announcement also highlights how agentic artificial intelligence changes traffic patterns and resource requirements. Cisco said agentic queries can generate up to 25 times more network traffic than a typical chatbot, transforming traffic from predictable bursts into continuous, high-intensity loads. Rather than moving large volumes of data to and from centralized data centers, the company argues models and infrastructure must be located where decisions are made. Cisco Unified Edge is presented as a response to that need, bringing processing and security closer to data sources to enable real-time inferencing and sustained agentic workloads.
