Cisco AI Research: The Most AI-ready Companies Outpace Peers in the Race to Value

Cisco announced the release of the results from the third annual Cisco AI 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.

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.

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.

"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 competitive advantage: companies that are further along are seeing dramatically stronger returns than their peers."

Cisco’s research outlines a consistent pattern among these leaders delivering real returns.

Pacesetters achieve more widespread results than their peers because of this approach: 90% report gains in profitability, productivity, and innovation, compared with ~60% overall.

The Index shows 83% of organizations plan to deploy AI agents, and nearly 40% expect them to work alongside employees within a year. But for majority of these companies, AI agents are exposing weak foundations — systems that can barely handle reactive, task-based AI, let alone AI systems that act autonomously and learn continuously. More than half (54%) of respondents say their networks can’t scale for complexity or data volume and just 15% describe their networks as flexible or adaptable.

Pacesetters are again the exception. Their disciplined, system-level approach has already helped lay the foundations they will need to scale.

The report introduces a new concept — AI Infrastructure Debt — the modern evolution of technical and digital debt that once held back digital transformation.

It’s the silent accumulation of compromises, deferred upgrades, and underfunded architecture that erodes the value of AI over time. Some early warning signs are already visible: 62% expect workloads to rise by over 30% within three years, 64% struggle to centralize data, only 26% have robust GPU capacity and fewer than one in three can detect or prevent AI-specific threats.

These early warning signs point to a gap between AI ambition and operational readiness. But when the systems that power AI aren’t secure, the debt can increase risk. Pacesetters aren’t immune, but their foresight, governance, and investment discipline help them to avoid problems compounding into more costly risks.

Source: Cisco media announcement