In the wake of this year's Cisco AI Summit, it's clear AI is reshaping the way we operate both individually and collectively. During one of the many conversations that took place at our AI Summit, Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer, and Aaron Levie, Box CEO, explored how Agentic AI necessitates the creation of new operational workflows. To truly harness AI's autonomous capabilities, we have to stop treating it as a plug-and-play tool that simply fits into existing workflows. Instead, organizations need to reimagine new workflows that can effectively work alongside AI agents.

Cisco has already fully embraced this paradigm shift; we recognize that driving AI innovation can't stop at simply providing our people with access to AI technology. Rather, it relies on how we empower our entire organization to experiment and build on foundational skills that enhance their AI fluency. At Cisco, one of the ways we do this is through hackathons; competitions where teams come together to build functional, technical solutions to specific problems.

How Hackathons Drive AI Innovation At Cisco

The Innovation League: AI in Action is just one of the many Cisco-wide global hackathon events. It brings together visionaries from across the organization and challenges them to move beyond ideation and into execution.

With AI serving as this year's central theme, participants were invited to reimagine how AI could transform the way we work, build, and serve our customers. The goal was to create solutions that addressed at least one of these three key areas: breaking boundaries, rethinking workflows, and creating measurable impact.

"The reason these hackathons are really important is because we want to produce and exchange breakthrough ideas we can take to market, so we can be the innovative company the world wants us to be." -Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco

Hundreds of teams across the globe submitted video demos and presentations showcasing AI-centered solutions. These teams were encouraged to think beyond the hackathon itself. And submissions were evaluated based on their scalability and real-world potential, creating a clear path from idea to productization.

The result? Several AI use cases and solutions designed to help us work smarter, better, and faster. A few key themes we noticed that describe how teams visualized leveraging AI to drive innovation:

• AI embedded across the engineering lifecycle: Accelerating how team can design, build, test, and operate systems.
• AI becoming part of the infrastructure layer: Enabling systems that can observe, reason, and adapt autonomously.
• AI as an operational multiplier: Automating complex workflows and reducing operational toil at scale.

Why This Matters

These events remain essential because their impact does not rely solely on their ability to produce compelling prototypes; rather, they continue to build on the momentum required to drive real cultural transformation. A culture where:

• Curiosity is encouraged
• Experimentation is supported
• Cross-functional collaboration is the norm
• AI fluency becomes practical, not theoretical

By empowering employees to actively build with AI, we accelerate our collective understanding of what's possible.

The Innovation League is one of the ways we ensure that we're not just adapting to the future of AI, we're shaping it.