Agentic AI for Business Leaders: Trust, Guardrails and Rollout Lessons from Cisco’s Joe Vaccaro

About this episode

Cisco put AI agents in the hands of all 90,000 of its employees, and Joe Vaccaro, an SVP at Cisco, is here to share what they learned. He joins Ryan Alford to break down how business leaders can roll out agentic AI quickly while still keeping the trust and guardrails that critical systems need. Joe explains why agents act like overconfident teenagers, why clear and specific direction beats vague prompts, and how giving AI the right context changes everything. He also covers the real cost of AI tokens, how model routing will bring that cost down, and when a company should train its own model on its own data. His closing advice is simple: don’t hand AI off to someone else. Use it yourself, because that’s the only way to see where it can really transform your business. Topics Covered: Lessons from Cisco’s company-wide AI agent rollout Why AI is moving faster than any past revolution Guardrails, trust and safety for AI agents Prompting with clarity and context AI costs, model routing and on-device models Turning your data into a competitive advantage Why leaders need to be hands-on with AI POWER YOUR BUSINESS WITH HIGHLEVEL Turn more leads into customers wit