Webit 2026: Securing the AI era: collaborative resilience for digital infrastructure - Matt Houlihan

In this talk, Matthew Hulahan, vice president of government affairs for Cisco in Europe, addresses the critical infrastructure needed to support the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI). He discusses the staggering investments in AI, noting a significant increase in its adoption among organizations. Hulahan emphasizes the importance of resilience in infrastructure, highlighting six foundational pillars necessary for AI readiness, including strategy, infrastructure, governance, and talent. He explores how legacy technology poses challenges and introduces new tools like defense claw aimed at enhancing security. The session also focuses on the need for collaboration between the private sector and policymakers to ensure equitable access to AI benefits, especially in underserved regions like Barnsley, which strives to become a tech town through partnerships and investments in education and infrastructure.

Up next, we move from AI ambition to the infrastructure that must support it. Ladies and gentlemen, every technological revolution is ultimately limited by the strength of the infrastructure beneath it. And artificial intelligence is no exception. As nations, businesses, and institutions race to deploy AI at scale, one question becomes increasingly important. Can the infrastructure we depend on remain trusted, secure, and resilient? Because AI is only as strong

as the networks, systems, and digital foundations that support it. For decades, Cisco has helped build and secure the infrastructure powering the global digital economy. Today, as AI becomes part of critical business operations, public services, and national competitiveness. The challenge is no longer simply innovation. It is resilience. Please welcome Matthew Hulahan, vice president, government affairs Europe at Cisco with his keynote, securing the AI era, collaborative resilience for

digital infrastructure. >> Hi everyone. I'm Matt Hulahan. I'm the vice president for government affairs at uh Cisco and I run uh the government affairs team right across Europe. It's my second at Webbit. It's wonderful to be back in Sophia. Uh what a wonderful city you have and it's great to be working with Cisco's local team here in Sophia uh to help deliver some of those AI ambitions

that we heard from the ministers earlier. I couldn't be more proud. We've heard already today about the amazing pace of uh AI development and you can see that over the past three or so years we've seen such a transformation in the technology uh not only in terms of its capability but also its deployment. Uh to illustrate this, according to Stanford University's 2026 AI readiness report, $344 billion

uh was spent in uh or invested in AI in 2025. And that was a two-fold increase over the figure for 2024. Uh we rarely see that sort of exponential change in the technology world or in the economic world. And so we're really living in the middle of something quite phenomenal at the moment. In a similar uh uh survey that they ran, they showed that 91% of organizations

in Europe said they were proactively using some form of AI in 2025 and that was up from 57% in 2023. So again, a near doubling in terms of the the proactive use of AI and I firmly believe that those use cases will continue to grow and we'll get deeper into this trend as we go along. So, a lot of excitement and a lot of uh interest in

AI. Now, you might be wondering why I've put a postcard of a a small northern town in England uh called Barnsley uh on uh the uh slides here. Well, one of the things I'm passionate about is making sure that this technology is uh uh as beneficial to as many people as it can possibly be. And I think that is the great challenge of our time is when

we live through these uh technological transformations is making sure that places like Barnsley and I'll tell you about that in a second can benefit. Now Barnsley is not a wealthy place. Barnsley has about half the GDP per capita of the rest of the uh UK. It's a former mining town. It had a glass um industry. It had a textiles industry. But much of that is gone now.

And what we need to do, I think, as a government community and as a business community, particularly those working in artificial intelligence, is focus not on not only on uh the the the big cities, uh the Londons, the New Yorks, the San Francisco, but also the Barnesley's of this world to make sure we're spreading the uh benefit there. But what what can we do and how should

we think about opening up opportunities for places like that? Well, I think there are there are six broad pillars that are the foundation sort of building blocks of what being ready for AI uh means. And I know some other speakers are going to cover some of this later as well. But I think any organization whether they're in Barnsley or elsewhere need to have strategy that has to

come from the top of the organization. You need to have leaders of organizations that are willing to take some bold bets in terms of how they want to use AI to change workflows to change their organizations and do things differently, more productively. You need the infrastructure. AI requires many more um much more capability in terms of digital infrastructure. There's a lot more data that's passing through and

so you really need to think about your infrastructure uh and and your secure infrastructure as part of that. You need your data in a format that can be used with your AI systems to make the most of it. You need to understand the governance. You need to understand things like uh data protection laws and other local regulations that are important to making sure you're operating within regulatory

guard rails. And most importantly, I would say you need the talent. You need your employees to really come on the journey with you. And you need the culture as well in that space. You need them to have the skills to work with AI tools. Cisco runs uh every year now uh what we call a Cisco AI readiness index and it's a survey of thousands of companies right

around the world and one of the striking things uh that we see every single year is that I'll just give you one statistic from it um 95% of the organizations that responded felt an urgent need to deploy AI so they could see the prize they could see the the need to do it but based on these six foundations these six building blocks only 14% 1/4% felt they

were fully prepared to do so. So I think at an organizational level there's a lot of uh reflection that's needed a lot of strategizing that's needed needed and a lot of action that's needed to be fully ready. Now I'm going to focus on one of those uh building blocks uh in in a slightly more deeper dive. It's so critical, we think, at Cisco, to enable that AI

opportunity and that AI growth uh right around the world. But guess what? We do need a step change in the capability of our digital infrastructure if we're going to take full advantage of this. We published a report a couple of weeks ago now that predicted that in just three years we'll see a three-fold increase in the amount of internet traffic uh due to uh AI. So by

2029 um and things like agentic AI uh which the speaker from Visa just talked about very eloquently will be a big driver of that. Uh in fact, Gartner uh recently predicted that every Fortune 500 company on average will have 150,000 agents working for it by 2028. That's just around the corner. And I can say that looking at how companies like Cisco and Visa are using Agentic AI.

Uh I think that's quite a conservative uh forecast. I think it will be much bigger than that actually. Uh you know, a a aentic a AI agents, it's kind of amazing. It's like waking up and, you know, being told that you can hire a thousand co-workers to help you automate some of the tasks that you you need to do. And I think it really is a an

industry trend that we'll see a lot more of. But guess what? Each of those agents on average at the moment generates five times more traffic than a human employee does. And so with leaning into that agentic AI future comes a real need to think about what the infrastructure um opportunities are or what the infrastructure needs are uh to support that. And so guess what? When we survey

our customers, 76% of them uh said that they needed network upgrades. Now Cisco is a big uh company focused on security as well as infrastructure and we think the two things have to go hand in hand. But obviously AI changes the game a little bit in terms of what um uh how we should think about security. It generates new challenges. It also creates new opportunities. Um and

that infrastructure doesn't count for anything unless it is uh super secure. Think about the patients health data or the financial information that the speaker from Visa just talked about. We need to make sure that that information which is critical to people's well-beings or people's financial futures uh is secure as those agents or as those those AI tools um uh deal with it. I looked in preparation for

this talk. You can look at a a great database that the um the US authorities maintain and they they track the number of vulnerabilities, the number of security flaws that are u flagged up to the agencies in the US and you can see that how the trends evolve yearon year and you know guess what uh there's been a rapid rise recently in the number of vulnerabilities these

security flaws in software or infrastructure that have been reported officially to uh this US vulnerability database. case. So you can see there that the figure for 2021 was something like 20,000 vulnerabilities which is still a large figure right but by 2025 just last year that had gone up to 50,000 and so quite a huge um increase there in quite a short um space of time. One of

the big factors that we're worried about right now at Cisco is what we call legacy technology. It is the the big volume of of infrastructure that's out there that frankly is not being supported uh by the folks that sell it. It's not being upgraded um it's not being um patched in terms of security software uh in in the way that it needs to be in order to

make it safe. And we call that legacy technology. But guess what? The 40% of those top 100 exploited vulnerabilities uh impact legacy technology. And so we think with because of the way that AI is evolving and this huge technical debt we have because of legacy technology, we need to really talk with urgency about the need to address that uh very very quickly. And so that's why you

know Cisco is introducing new products like things like um defense claw which tries to automate uh the provisioning of uh new AI agents to ensure that they operate within your organization's uh security boundaries. And we think approaches like that are critical to um critical to making a success of AI opportunities. People will simply lose confidence in the technology if we don't ensure that it's resilient and uh

secure from the outset. And a big part of that is yes, the software, but also the the infrastructure that we work with as Now, I introduced myself as the vice president for government affairs. And another thing I'm passionate about and a firm believer in is that these opportunities will only come about if businesses like Cisco who are developing the technologies that underpin this AI uh revolution go

handinhand and we work handinhand with policy makers. Uh we can do a lot as the private sector and you've seen the amount of investment that's being made by the private sector particularly in the US. But we need to work handin glove with policy makers who uh hold so many of the levers in terms of making creating those ecosystems as the minister uh talked about earlier uh and

uh enabling everyone to benefit from these wonderful technologies. So I think thinking about what those partnerships look like and how we work with governments I would say uh we need to have the trusted um partnerships. We need to be looking at things like AI security institutes. Governments need to be investing in those to create the capabilities to understand security risks with AI. Um, and businesses need to

partner with them on that to make sure that we're sharing the right information. We're sharing knowledge with governments on that in a secure and trusted way. Skills is so important. I talked about how organizations need to scale up uh in in terms of their employees. Uh, and businesses can do so much of that. In fact, Cisco has a wonderful networking academy that we've run now um in

Bulgaria and around the world since 1999. And in fact, in Europe, we've had over 5 million uh European citizens taking our networking academy courses in things like networking and cyber security and now AI. And we're super proud of uh the impact that that has had and the opportunity that's creating. But obviously we need governments to be really tuning into what AI means for national curricula as well.

We need universities to be doing that too. We need to see investment in innovation and infrastructure. So things like the EU gigafactories are a really interesting development and we should see over the summer um how the funding from an EU level uh will play out in terms of that. But we need all governments, I think, to be investing and stimulating private sector investment in um in in

in in the right sort of AI infrastructure. Yes, we need regulation and standards. They're really important uh to make it success of um uh of AI. Uh and we need governments to think about adoption particularly to look at the barriers that smaller companies face when they try and adopt AI. You know, is it a price thing? Is it a skills thing? Is it a a confidence thing?

And to think about what national programs can help uh small companies in particular adopt these technologies that will help them grow, help them export, help them expand, help them employ more people. So we think that's really important. So let me wrap up by coming back to um Barnsley. As I said, I think it's these sorts of places that we need to focus on as a as a

policymaking community, as a business community to make sure we're spreading those benefits of AI as broadly as possible. And we can only do that if they can benefit from uh infrastructure, but they can do that in a secure way as well. They need to have the confidence in the technology. So, I'm really proud to say that Barnsley earlier this year announced itself as the UK's first tech

town. And with that came support from the national government but also partnerships with companies like Cisco who are now working with local hospitals, local colleges uh to provide infrastructure and to provide the skills that the people advancly need to uh create new job opportunities to create 21st century public services uh and to really embrace the AI opportunity that's ahead of us. Thank you very much.