At Cisco Live 2025, the networking giant rolled out a sweeping agenda to make artificial intelligence not just powerful, but practical — and secure. In this episode, we caught up with leaders from Cisco, NVIDIA and WWT to talk about what this year's announcements actually mean for enterprise teams tasked with building scalable, secure, AI-ready infrastructure. From the rise of the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to the reality of agentic workflows and persistent inference traffic, this episode unpacks the architectural shifts reshaping the modern data center.

Learn more about this week's guests:

Kevin Wollenweber is Cisco's Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center, Internet, and Cloud Infrastructure. In this role, he leads product strategy to enhance Cisco's infrastructure solutions for the data center, high-performance routing, and mobile networks. His leadership is pivotal in driving growth and developing cutting-edge solutions to meet the dynamic needs of businesses worldwide.

Kevin's top pick: About Cisco and WWT

Chris Marriott is the VP/GM of Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA, where he has spent 14 years advancing enterprise solutions. With a background in engineering, including 10 years in ASIC development, Chris combines technical expertise with strategic insight to address the evolving tech landscape.

Chris's top pick: About NVIDIA and WWT

Neil Anderson has over 30 years of experience in Software Development, Wireless, Security, Networking, Data Center, Cloud and AI technologies. At WWT Neil is an VP in our Global Solutions and Architecture team, with responsibility for over $16B in WWT's solutions portfolio across AI, Networking, Cloud, Data Center, and Automation. Neil advises many large organizations on their global architecture and IT strategy across Global Enterprise, Global Service Provider, and Public Sector. Neil is also on the advisory board of several high-tech companies and startups.

Neil's top pick: Building for Success: A CTO's Guide to Generative AI

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.