Press release
Cisco AI Research: The Most AI-ready Companies Outpace Peers in the Race to Value
The 'Pacesetters' are 4x more likely to move AI pilots into production, and 50% more likely to report measurable value from AI. News summary: AI adoption
About this update from Cisco Systems, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"\n The 'Pacesetters' are 4x more likely to move AI pilots into production, and 50% more likely to report measurable value from AI.\n \n \n News summary:\n \n \n \n AI adoption matters: The most AI-ready organizations are 4x more likely to move pilots into production and 50% more likely to see measurable value.\n \n Agentic AI on the rise: 83% plan to deploy AI agents, and nearly 40% expect them to work alongside employees within a year — but few have the secure infrastructure to sustain it.\n \n Barriers to AI adoption: The report identifies some of the obstacles that risk slowing innovation and growth, such as rising workloads, insufficient GPU capacity, and a lack of centralized data.\n \n \n SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking and security, today released the results from the third annual CiscoAI Readiness Index. A small but consistent group of companies surveyed — the 'Pacesetters,' about 13% of organizations for the last three years — outperform their peers across every measure of AI value, captured for the first time in Cisco's global study of over 8,000 AI leaders across 30 markets and 26 industries.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n The Pacesetters' sustained advantage indicates a new form of resilience: a disciplined, system-level approach that balances strategic drivers with the data and infrastructure needed to keep pace with AI's accelerating evolution. They're already architecting for the future with 98% designing their networks for the growth, scale and complexity of AI compared to 46% overall.\n The combination of foresight and foundation is delivering real, tangible results at a time when two major forces are starting to reshape the landscape: AI agents, which raise the bar for scale, security, and governance; and AI Infrastructure Debt, the early warning signs of hidden bottlenecks that threaten to erode long-term value.\n \"We're moving past the era of question-answering chatbots and stepping into the next major phase of AI: agents that independently execute tasks,\" said Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer. \"Today's study shows that over 80% of companies are prioritizing agentic solutions, with two out of three reporting that these systems are already meeting or exceeding their performance goals. The evidence points to a massive co...