When I talk to customers, I often hear that their workplaces are not ready to handle the competing demands created by distributed work and the influx of AI and IoT. Regardless of industry or physical attributes, workplaces are part of a connected and complex environment.

When planning for the future of your wireless network, it's essential to consider how Wi-Fi access points integrate with your entire network infrastructure and evolving business needs. Factors like traffic management by switches, how access points connect to other parts of the network, and device security must also be considered. Focusing solely on access points without this broader perspective may lead to connectivity and security challenges. It's nearly impossible to prepare workplaces for the future by looking at these pieces in isolation. A fragmented approach leads to security holes, visibility gaps, and experience breakdown.

At Cisco Live 2025 Amsterdam, our teams unveiled innovations designed to tackle these challenges head on. From new Wi-Fi 7 access points to AI-powered security cameras, cutting-edge network security, and AI-native assurance enhancements, we're helping organizations globally create truly future-proofed workplaces in almost every environment. Let's dive into how these technologies are empowering you, our customers, to operate with confidence.

Intelligent: Making every space smarter

Imagine a world where every branch, office, and campus space works smarter for you. To make that vision a reality, we're expanding our Wi-Fi 7 portfolio to bring enterprise-grade capabilities to sites of any size.

With the new Wi-Fi 7 Cisco Wireless 9172 Series Access Points, distributed organizations in financial services, retail, and healthcare can now harness the bandwidth, security, and intelligent assurance of 6 Ghz wireless in branches, stores, and local clinics. These access points have a software-defined radio to enhance capacity in 5 Ghz for geographies where 6 GHz is not available or there is no 6 GHz demand as part of the deployment. And with Cisco Spaces included with our improved unified licensing, every site can deliver real-time location tracking across Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? Low Energy while also simplifying IoT sensor management through an open, multi-vendor partner ecosystem and a comprehensive application programming interface (API). With real-time, actionable insights into how people and things interact within buildings, these new and improved access points make it easier to gain spatial context and build seamless integrations.

Get details on the full Wi-Fi 7 solution

The Cisco Wireless 9172I Access Point is ideal for branch offices, retail stores, and healthcare facilities, providing flexible deployment options and reliable connectivity to support critical business applications and IoT devices. Arriving this spring, the Cisco Wireless 9172H Access Point is purpose-built for hospitality and multi-dwelling unit environments and addresses unique needs, such as in-room connectivity and smart building capabilities. Both models offer an entry into Wi-Fi 7, enabling businesses to scale their networks efficiently and meet growing connectivity demands.

Imagine hospitals where critical equipment can be tracked and located in real time, ensuring that healthcare professionals can access the assets they need without delay. The Wi-Fi 7 access points provide ultra-reliable high-speed connectivity with enhanced security and resilience, ensuring seamless operation of critical medical equipment and patient monitoring systems. Coupled with Cisco Spaces, these access points transform into powerful sensors that enable real-time location tracking of medical assets, staff, and patients. IT teams can now derive value from every space in the hospital, driving outcomes like efficient asset management and improved patient care (through locating assets equipped with radio frequency ID [RFID] tags), and enhanced safety (through precise monitoring of high-risk areas). Additionally, the platform's analytics offer insights into space utilization and device performance, supporting informed decision-making and operational efficiency in the complex hospital environment.

Cisco access points provide secure Wi-Fi access for patients and staff, real-time location services to find critical assets, resilient bandwidth for patient data and medical apps, and securely connect and power every device on the network.

Powering this new wireless infrastructure are Cisco MS150 cloud-managed switches, designed to scale and optimize connectivity for these smaller sites. With twelve different models, these switches provide up to 60W PoE++, with mGig capacity, flexible SFP+ uplinks, and rich stacking capabilities. This scalability supports growing wired and wireless infrastructure demands, making them ideal for adopting Wi-Fi 7 and more.

Learn more about the full potential of the cloud-managed MS150

Secured: Safeguarding your assets at every site

To streamline security management across distributed organizations, Cisco has introduced org-wide firewall policies, simplifying the process of policy creation and enforcement. Adding confidence to these announcements, I'm excited to share our NetSecOpen certification on the Catalyst 8300 Edge Platform for the next-gen firewall capability. Ensuring you a whopping 98.8% security effectiveness score, security teams get real-world confidence in its performance and protection capabilities. Now with bolstered protection, the enhanced multicloud networking security ensures seamless connectivity for branches working with cloud providers like Oracle and Microsoft Azure. Regardless of the physical attributes of branches, Cisco SD-WAN Interconnect allows customers to choose a mix-and-match, best-fit choice of SD-WAN across disparate locations and streamline management from a single dashboard. Sites with similar attributes can run the most operationally efficient SD-Branch solution with Meraki. If certain or all locations require precise WAN configurations, you can deploy a customizable SD-WAN with Catalyst.

Get the details on how to use SD-WAN Interconnects

With Cisco XDR, you can instantly integrate with Meraki MX appliances at scale to automatically detect and respond to advanced threats, prevent real-time ones with a powerful next-gen firewall, and streamline management to a single dashboard. Mountains of multi-site network telemetry from MX appliances is correlated and contextualized using ML to rapidly detect sophisticated attacks, while AI instantly suggests, or even automates, remediation.

See how to integrate Meraki MX appliances at scale

And we're not stopping with securing digital assets. By extending our Meraki MV smart cameras portfolio, customers can protect and secure their people and physical assets. Meraki MV introduces two new smart cameras to their lineup. The MV53X is a bullet-style camera with 4K resolution and AI analytics, including people counting. The MV84X is a multi-imager camera with four independent cameras in one housing, offering easy deployment with a single cable and comprehensive coverage for detailed monitoring. Similarity Search with Cross-Camera Tracking, a feature coming soon to Vision Portal, will allow security teams to rely on privacy-first AI/ML technology to track the entire path of a "person of interest" along multiple cameras deployed in the space without the use of facial recognition.

Check out the specs at Meraki MV

Assured: Ensuring performance across owned and unowned networks

Future-proofing your organization means ensuring excellent performance, no matter the challenge. Assurance tools from Cisco make it easy to maintain high-performing operations across both owned and unowned networks.

ThousandEyes Traffic Insights, launching in March 2025, provides out-of-the-box correlation of flow and synthetic data across branch-owned networks, enabling organizations to proactively optimize and resolve performance issues before they escalate.

We often hear from customers that they need more time for deployments, planning, or innovation. That's why we're always building more automation and intelligence to eliminate time wasted on tasks beneath your skillset. We're excited to offer a surge of updates centered around AI and automation. Check out a brief list of recent achievements:

• We've launched the Assurance Overview page in the Meraki dashboard with an integration with ThousandEyes. Designed for all things network assurance and to empower IT teams with comprehensive network visibility, you can proactively troubleshoot and ensure consistently excellent network performance and end-user experiences.
• We've updated AI-enhanced Radio Resource Management (AI-RRM) with Assurance Data Engine for Wi-Fi 7, powered by ThousandEyes. Optimize Wi-Fi 7 performance by making automated, intelligent radio frequency adjustments utilizing machine learning algorithms.
• We're bringing AI-powered event summarization to IT with ThousandEyes, automatically providing customers with easy-to-understand context for complex events across large end user populations that help pinpoint impact and accelerate resolution at scale.
• We're bringing more advanced tools to Client Path Visualization, with enhanced visual connection mapping from ThousandEyes, more detailed client and network timeline data, and a network service health performance dashboard for greater insight and better network grasp and control.
• We've made it even easier to control alerts and notifications with Alerts Config. Network operators can configure 130+ organization alerts in one centralized location, manage bulk alerts, and more.
• We streamlined network troubleshooting by adding the Configuration Change Log to the assurance overview page. IT admin can now swiftly determine if recent configuration changes might be impacting network performance.

Learn more about Cisco innovations in assurance

Revolutionize, don't react

With secure networking solutions from Cisco, IT leaders can lead the revolution-not react to it. Spin up hundreds or thousands of new sites faster and deploy any digital initiative without fear of the unknown. Leave crisis mode behind and embrace the thrill of riding the forefront of technology across campus and branch networks.

Learn more about Cisco wireless networking