“The basic unit of a company will evolve from a human being to an AI agent,” Lee said on Thursday at a summit on disruptive technologies hosted by Swiss bank UBS. AI agents are software apps that use AI to autonomously execute tasks and achieve goals on behalf of users.

Lee pointed out that AI agents could operate around the clock, be replicated infinitely, and scale effortlessly – capabilities unmatched by human workers. “If you have a super employee, you can’t replicate [them], right? Human cloning is not legal, but AI agent cloning is perfectly fine, and they will scale,” he said.

“You can completely use agents as Lego blocks,” he said. “So you have a Lego block that’s [human resources], a Lego block that’s legal, a Lego block that is finance, and then a Lego block for customer service, et cetera.”

“Then you can have a huge, giant Lego-created machinery that is your company agent, where the CEO interacts and manages the company, and that’s what [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman means when he says there will be US$1 billion companies.”

Splunk Observability unlocks actionable AI insights to help organizations improve the reliability of their entire digital estate 

Today Cisco announced agentic AI-powered Splunk Observability, an AI-native approach to observability that sets a new standard for how customers can strengthen their resilience. The enhanced Splunk Observability portfolio unifies observability across environments, surfaces actionable business context, and deploys AI-powered agents across the full incident response lifecycle, while monitoring both its performance and quality. Through integrations across Cisco technologies with Splunk, customers gain unmatched visibility and correlation of data insights across their networks, infrastructure, and applications to improve the reliability of their entire digital estate.

“Our mission is clear – to help organizations put AI applications and agents to work, while retaining visibility and control,” said Patrick Lin, SVP and GM of Splunk Observability. “With the latest innovations in Splunk Observability, we are empowering enterprises to proactively monitor their critical applications and digital services with ease, resolve issues before they escalate, and ensure the value and outcomes they derive from observability are commensurate with the cost.”

Agentic AI is reshaping what it takes to build a leading observability practice. As AI-assisted coding gains steam, applications will be built with less human involvement. At the same time, a new wave of AI-enabled applications and AI agents demand specialized telemetry to confirm models are performing as intended – aligned to business purpose and cost. To keep pace, organizations need unified, in-context, visibility across all of these environments to prioritize issues based on business impact.

Agentic AI-powered observability: proactive detection, investigation and resolution

Splunk is advancing Cisco’s AgenticOps vision through an enhanced Splunk Observability portfolio, supercharged by new agentic AI innovations. These innovations will deploy AI agents to automate telemetry collection and alert configuration, detect issues, identify root causes, and recommend fixes – freeing ITOps and engineering teams to focus on innovation. These advancements include:

• AI Troubleshooting Agents: Offered in Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk AppDynamics, these agentic AI features automatically analyse incidents and surface potential root causes, helping users to quickly act on issues.
• Event iQ: Offered in Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), Event iQ helps teams easily set up automated alert correlation to quickly reduce alert noise and gain clear context on grouped alerts.
• ITSI Episode Summarization: In conjunction with AI-driven alert correlation through Event iQ, Episode Summarization in Splunk ITSI automatically provides overviews of grouped alerts, including trends, impact and root cause, to help troubleshoot faster.

Observability for AI to monitor the performance of AI agents, LLMs, and infrastructure 

As organizations integrate AI and large language models (LLMs) into their applications and deploy AI agents, they need specialized analytics to help ensure their AI is behaving as intended. Splunk helps teams proactively monitor the health, security, and cost of their AI application stack, including agents, LLMs, and AI Infrastructure, with:

• AI Agent Monitoring: Monitors the quality, security, and cost of LLMs and AI agents to determine whether models are performing at the right price and as intended, to align with business goals.
• AI Infrastructure Monitoring: Proactively monitors the health and consumption of AI infrastructure by alerting on bottlenecks and spikes across services to manage costs.

Unified observability that surfaces business and end-user impact

Cisco is bringing the best of Splunk AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud together to provide a unified experience across three-tier and microservices environments, and deepening integration with Cisco ThousandEyes so ITOps, NetOps and Engineering teams can pinpoint the network’s impact on application performance and end-user experience. The innovations include:

• Business Insights in Splunk Observability Cloud: Teams can correlate application performance with the real-time health of critical business processes, such as checkout, loan processing, and supply chain flows with minimal setup.
• Digital Experience Analytics in Splunk Observability Cloud: Product and design teams can gain deep visibility into user journeys and behaviour, accessing richer customer experience insights and a faster setup.
• APM support for hybrid apps and business transactions in Splunk Observability Cloud: These capabilities strengthen APM for cloud-native applications and extend support for hybrid environments—building on Splunk AppDynamics’ expertise in monitoring traditional three-tier applications.
• Session Replay for Real User Monitoring (RUM) for Splunk AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud: New Browser and Mobile Session Replay in Splunk AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud will help teams optimize online experiences.
• Splunk AppDynamics Agent: Leveraging OpenTelemetry, this agent enables customers to collect data in either Splunk AppDynamics or Observability Cloud, enabling Splunk AppDynamics customers to use the observability offering that suits their needs.
• Splunk Observability Cloud Real User Monitoring (RUM) Integration with Cisco ThousandEyes: Users can correlate real-user experience with network performance across owned and third-party domains, to help pinpoint regions or services affected by network bottlenecks.

“Through the new agentic AI innovations within Splunk Observability, Cisco offers organizations more proactive visibility and actionable insights into both their digital operations and AI system health and performance,” said Torsten Volk, Principal Analyst, Application Modernization, Enterprise Strategy Group. “These kinds of capabilities are critical as enterprises look to scale AI in a controlled and reliable manner.”

Availability:

• Splunk AI Agent Monitoring, AI Troubleshooting Agents, ITSI Episode Summarization, Business Insights, Digital Experience Analytics, and Splunk RUM Integration with Cisco ThousandEyes are available or will be available soon in Alpha (private preview).
• All other innovations listed are now generally available to all global regions.

For more details on all of Splunk’s .conf25 announcements, please visit our newsroom. Availability dates and regions are subject to change.

Many of the products and features mentioned are still in development and will be made available as they are finalized, subject to ongoing evolution in development and innovation. The timeline for their release is subject to change.

About Cisco 

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word ‘partner’ does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

About Splunk LLC

Splunk, a Cisco company, helps build a safer and more resilient digital world. Organizations trust Splunk to prevent security, infrastructure and application issues from becoming major incidents, absorb shocks from digital disruptions, and accelerate digital transformation.

Splunk and the Splunk> logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word “‘partner”’ does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco or its affiliates and any other company.

Growth doesn’t always come from doing more, it often comes from doing things differently. Business leaders are beginning to realize that traditional content marketing is no longer enough to gain traction. The rise of AI-powered content isn’t just a shift in execution, it’s a complete change in how companies build visibility, authority, and trust in digital spaces.

For early-stage teams, this shift presents a rare opportunity. An AI SEO Agent for Startups KIVA reshapes how content strategies are developed, deployed, and discovered by both search engines and generative AI models.

Wellows’ KIVA is built for a new era of search. It turns hours of manual SEO into a streamlined workflow that delivers strategies, briefs, and optimized drafts in minutes. Startups gain visibility not only on Google but also on AI-driven engines like ChatGPT and Gemini. The result is content that’s faster, smarter, and built for the future.

How Well Does Your Content Perform in a Search and AI World?

Content remains one of the most powerful growth levers available to any business. But how people find and interact with that content has changed dramatically.

Ten years ago, ranking on Google was the primary goal. Today, customers are also discovering brands through AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. If your content isn’t optimized to appear in both search and AI-generated responses, you’re missing a growing segment of visibility.

This means business leaders need to ask new questions:

• Is our content structured to be referenced by AI models?
• Are we publishing what people are actively asking online right now?
• Can we scale content without hiring a full SEO team?

Answering these questions requires a new kind of content engine—one that’s built to serve today’s search habits.

The Role of AI SEO Agents in Driving Business Growth

Unlike traditional SEO tools that offer data dashboards and keyword lists, an AI SEO Agent acts as a content operations partner. It analyzes real-time trends, automates research, and generates publication-ready briefs—all while keeping your brand voice and growth goals in focus.

For business leaders, here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Speed-to-market without sacrificing content quality
• Smarter briefs and outlines, grounded in live search demand and LLM patterns
• Unified content strategy that serves both organic search and AI-assisted discovery
• Reduced operational load, especially for small or overstretched teams

This isn’t about replacing marketers—it’s about giving them a high-performance teammate that works 24/7, at scale, without micromanagement.

Why Startups Are Leading This Shift

Startups don’t have the luxury of bloated teams or slow marketing cycles. That’s why AI SEO agents like KIVA are built with startup workflows in mind.

KIVA adapts to how fast-moving teams work:

• It analyzes keyword clusters based on user intent, LLM behavior, and topical authority.
• It generates structured briefs with outlines, tone, PAA suggestions, and competitive context.
• It drafts long-form content that’s not just SEO-optimized, but also citation-worthy by AI engines.
• It even audits for readability, originality, and brand alignment automatically.

Instead of managing multiple SEO tools, spreadsheets, and workflows, founders and marketers can focus on what matters: publishing content that ranks, gets referenced, and drives qualified traffic.

And with visibility baked in from both search engines and LLMs, KIVA turns SEO from a long game into a short-term win generator.

From Unknown to Unmissable: The Power of LLM Visibility

One of the biggest shifts in digital growth is the influence of large language models (LLMs). More users now ask questions directly to AI assistants than ever before. If your brand isn’t part of the answers, it’s being left out of the conversation.

AI SEO Agents like KIVA solve this by understanding what LLMs prefer:

• Structured content
• Semantic relevance
• Authoritative sources
• Clear topical depth

By creating content with these patterns in mind, startups are seeing their brands surface in ChatGPT answers, be cited in Perplexity searches, and even referenced in AI-generated summaries across the web.

This creates a second layer of visibility beyond search rankings—and gives lean teams a shot at outsized reach.

What Business Leaders Need to Know

The future of SEO isn’t just about beating competitors on Google. It’s about becoming a trusted source for both human and AI readers. That requires content that performs across multiple discovery channels—without adding more weight to your team.

Here’s how to think about it as a leader:

• SEO is no longer a department—it’s a growth function. AI content has blurred the lines between marketing, product, and sales enablement.
• Your brand voice must scale. An AI SEO Agent like KIVA ensures your unique tone and messaging stay consistent across every touchpoint.
• Speed matters. The brands getting cited, ranked, and surfaced fastest are those who can go from insight to content in hours—not weeks.

Most importantly, this is no longer experimental. It’s working right now for startups across industries who have chosen to adapt early.

Final Takeaway

AI content doesn’t mean giving up control. It means designing systems that amplify your vision, automate your workflow, and increase your brand’s discoverability in the places that matter most.

For business leaders ready to future-proof their content strategy, the answer isn’t more tools—it’s smarter ones.

And in the case of startups, the smartest choice might just be bringing on an AI SEO Agent that acts like part of your team.