Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says “The Mythos Effect” will see customers scour their networks for unsupported devices and replace them ASAP.

Mythos is Anthropic’s bug-finding model and has proven so effective that vendors and open source projects are now finding more security flaws and pushing more patches.

Speaking on Cisco’s Q4 earnings call yesterday, Robbins said customers he speaks to are aware of Mythos, and fearful that the model and others like it will mean that unsupported devices become too risky to operate once patches stop flowing.

“I had one of my CEO friends who runs a major manufacturer in the US … their team called early on in the Mythos wave and just said: ‘Hey, listen, we got to get some of this stuff that is past LDOS’ [last day of support].”

Robbins said other Cisco customers have done likewise.

“We’ve seen the pipeline increase meaningfully as a result of Mythos, which is really showing up as a network refresh,” he said. The CEO thinks some customers might be paying for new Cisco kit with their security budgets rather than cash allocated to networking expenses. He’ll take it either way.

CFO Mark Patterson said buyers who need rapid replacements for their kit won’t have to wait.

“We really do not have any significant lead time issues that we are seeing,” he said, before indulging in a little competitive sniping by adding “unlike we have heard a number of different peers talk about.”

Robbins said The Mythos Effect is one of three factors contributing to a “supercycle” of network spending. One is the need to prepare for quantum computing, either with quantum-safe networks or quantum-resistant decryption.

The other is, of course, AI. Robbins thinks agentic AI will take off, and see Cisco sell bucketloads of fresh kit to hyperscalers, and replacement kit to businesses that want to implement AI and realize their existing networks aren’t up to the job.

Cisco reported $17.3 billion revenue for the quarter, and $63.3 billion for the year, increases of 17 percent and 12 percent respectively. Net income rose 51 percent to $3.9 billion for Q4, while the full-year result of $13.27 billion was a 30 percent jump.

“We delivered the highest revenue, operating margin, and earnings per employee in thirty years,” Robbins crowed. “In FY27, we expect all these metrics to continue to improve.”

Investors appear to have been a little confused by what they heard, as Cisco’s share price spiked after its earnings announcement, before settling four percent lower than its closing price.

Robo-support revealed

Robbins also touched on Cisco’s own use of AI, which he said saw 145,000 support cases “resolved entirely by AI with zero human intervention” during FY26.

If you’re a Cisco customer, let us know how that works for you.

The CEO also revealed that Cisco operates an in-house AI Assistant called “Circuit” that he said “is fully embedded in how Cisco operates” and handled over 75 million prompts in Q4 alone.

“Circuit runs on our Secure AI Factory infrastructure which improves GPU utilization and automatically routes each task to the appropriate large language model, allowing us to manage token consumption,” he said. ®