Cisco AI Summit 2026: Bold Statements From OpenAI, Intel And AWS CEOs

A handful of tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan and AWS’ Matt Garman, joined Cisco’s top executives in conversations about the future of AI, leadership and technology’s impact on human progress during Cisco’s AI Summit 2026.

Technology CEOs and thought leaders in the AI arena agree that the landscape in 2026 is being defined by surging demand, rapidly advancing capabilities, and mounting pressure on infrastructure.

At Cisco’s AI Summit this week, a handful of some of the most innovative CEOs, including OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman, Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan and Amazon Web Services’ Matt Garman joined Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins and President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel in conversations about the future of AI, leadership and technology’s impact on human progress. The CEOs across the board confirmed that AI is entering a phase of inevitable integration into every layer of business and society. Altman likened future AI demand to utilities like electricity, something people will use constantly as models become less expensive, faster and more capable. Tan, for his part, added a hardware‑level perspective, warning that memory shortages could bottleneck AI advancement until at least 2028, even as compute demand skyrockets. Meanwhile, Garman highlighted that enterprise hesitation isn’t rooted in capability gaps but in risk as many companies fear autonomous agents acting unsafely on their own.

Here’s what some of the biggest thought leaders in the AI space had to say at the Cisco AI Summit about the AI landscape in 2026 and how it will be defined by explosive innovation and rising infrastructure pressure.

Sam Altman, Co-Founder, CEO, OpenAI

People always talk about the total market demand for AI. It feels to me something like the market demand for electricity or energy. You can’t talk about that as a general thing. You can say how much demand there will be at different price levels. And in this case, you can say different price levels for different quality, like how smart it is, or how fast it is or things like that. But if we continue to make AI really capable and really cheap, there will be a ton of demand at some price. If it’s more expensive, there will be less demand. But I would like the world to just get to use a ton of it. We’re in this capability already now where people are like, ‘Oh, I can use it for [chat],’ and some people understand you can use it for code. I think this will just be like how we do stuff. How companies run, how scientific discovery happens, how we use most software, personally, in our lives and making a lot of it, if we can have it at a reasonable price, seems like a very good bet.

Chuck Robbins, Chair, CEO, Cisco Systems

We all believe 2026 is going to be a turning point for AI, and we believe that this will be the year of agentic applications. And we believe that … the impact on what we do every day is going to change significantly, whether we’re talking to our enterprise customers or governments around the world, we know we have to embrace this. Many of us believe it’s the biggest transition that we’ve ever seen. And I’m old. I’ve been through a lot of them and this, I do believe, will be more revolutionary and it’s moving faster, obviously, than anything that we’ve ever seen. There are lots of questions and discussions about what does it mean to your enterprise infrastructure, what does it mean to your security posture? What does it mean to application development cycles? All those things are really important. And [we] know that those of us who embrace AI will ultimately be the winners.

Lip-Bu Tan, CEO, Intel

In terms of the AI, the biggest challenge, I think, for a lot of my customers is memory. Memory, actually, there’s no relief as far as I know. I talk to three key players, two of them I talk to very frequently, and they told me there’s no relief until 2028 because I think AI sucks up a lot of memory. … I think it’s very important to have that memory. If anything is going to slow down, [it is] going to be [because of] the memory. That is one. Secondly, I think it’s clearly from the compute side. And I was very happy to hear that customers are all crying for more products, and I didn’t prepare the production enough to meet the requirement. I think people started to find out that in application, CPU actually is more useful in terms of performance for all the compute requirements. [The need for] compute is increasing so much, and right now, my biggest challenge is focused on our production of supply chain to make sure we can meet the requirement. Almost every CEO, they call me up [and say], ‘Lip-Bu, can I have more? I’m your friend. I’m your customer, the most important customer. I want to have more of that.’ Somehow, it’s kind of encouraging for me to see that compute is becoming very important.

Matt Garman, CEO, AWS

I have this analogy that I like to use that [there’s] a giant canyon, and there’s a board across the canyon—you walk really slow across that board, right? Like, really slow—you might crawl across it. Now, all of a sudden, if you put handrails up and you put walls and guardrails, you can run across it. And it’s weird because it’s the same board. Part of what slows people down is they’re worried, right? We had examples internally where somebody was writing some code, and they asked the agent to go do something, and the agent was just about to go delete some infrastructure because they thought that was the fastest way to do it. And no, that will actually cause production issues if you go do that. We have other controls so that wasn’t the case, but it highlights [the fact that] I think lots of companies are worried that if they just unleash agents into their enterprise, bad things will happen. Production will go down. Security issues will happen. And so, what I would say is, what we’re trying to do is build building blocks for customers so that they can go fast. Things like AgentCore for us allow you to have some of these guardrails that allow you to go fast, and the more you give your teams safe places to run fast in a production setting, I think you’ll benefit.

Jeetu Patel, President, Chief Product Officer, Cisco

One of the challenges that we have, that we collectively as a community [have to] address, is AI is moving at a pace much faster than organizations have the capacity to absorb it. And that’s actually something that has to get solved for, and that’s a change management exercise, that’s a cultural exercise, that’s something that we have to make sure that we, collectively as a community, work together on because just building bigger, faster technology that doesn’t actually keep in mind how that technology can be absorbed is not really going to go out and get us what we what we need. So, it’s truly a paradox of progress. On one hand, every day, AI is solving harder problems. On the other hand, you can start to see that we are struggling with articulating concrete impact on ROI with these technologies on a consistent basis.