Most companies say they are “doing AI.” Very few are actually ready for it. In my new episode of The Ravit Show, I sat down with Simon Miceli, Managing Director, Cisco, who leads Cloud and AI Infrastructure across Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China. He sits right where big AI ambitions meet the hard reality of networks, security, and technical debt.This conversation builds on my earlier episode with Jeetu Patel, President and CPO Cisco and goes deeper into what it really takes to get AI working in production in APJC.Here are a few themes we unpacked:-- Only a small group is truly AI ready- Cisco’s latest AI Readiness Index shows that just a small percentage of organizations globally are able to turn AI into real business value. Cisco calls them “Pacesetters.”- They are not just running pilots. They have use cases in production and are seeing returns.-- We are entering the agentic phase of AI- Simon talked about how we are moving from simple chatbots to AI agents that can take action.- That shift changes everything for infrastructure.- Instead of short bursts of activity, you now have systems that are always working in the background, automating processes and touching real operations.-- AI infrastructure debt is the new technical debt*- Many organizations are carrying years of compromises in their networks, data centers, and security.- Simon called this “AI infrastructure debt” and described how it quietly slows down innovation, increases costs, and makes it harder to scale AI safely.-- Network as a foundation, not an afterthought- One of his strongest points: leaders often think first about compute, but the companies that are ahead treat the network as the base layer for AI.- When workloads double, your network can become the bottleneck before your GPUs do. - The Pacesetters are already investing to make their networks “AI ready” and integrating AI deeply with both network and cloud.Three things leaders must fix in the next 2–3 yearsSimon shared a very clear checklist for CIOs and business leaders who are serious about agentic AI: 1. Solve for power before it becomes a constraint 2. Treat deployment as day one and keep optimizing models after they go live 3. Build security into the infrastructure from the start so it accelerates innovation instead of blocking itThis was a very honest, no-nonsense view of where APJC really stands on AI, and what the leading organizations are doing differently!!!!Thank you Simon for joining me and sharing how Cisco is thinking about AI infrastructure across the region.#data #ai #cisco #CiscoLiveAPJC #Sponsored #CiscoPartner #TheRavitShow