In a rare case of science fiction lagging behind real-world technology, the AI agent in Project Hail Mary’s interstellar ship has all the personality of a lifeless, wandering asteroid. So, lonely Ryan Gosling must await the arrival of an affable alien made of rocks to finally have an engaging conversation.

Back on Earth in 2026, however, agentic AI inspired by some other Hollywood extraterrestrials recently showed just how conversant, convenient, and impactful this groundbreaking technology can be, especially for IT.

“We created a conversational interface for our Cisco AI Assistant,” said Aruna Ravichandran, Cisco’s SVP and chief marketing officer for AI, networking, and collaboration. “So, an IT professional can talk to the AI Assistant like it’s another human. And if they switched on our Galaxy Mode, they could get important, real-time information in a tone inspired by a favorite wise movie character.”

Released on “May the Fourth” (of course!), Galaxy Mode ran through the month. It showed the way towards a future in which agentic AI and IT collaborate to solve pressing challenges in the most engaging and natural ways. For starters, Galaxy Mode’s otherworldly persona was way more friendly, wise, and predictive than Ryan Gosling’s stiff interstellar agent. That conversational element — which in Galaxy Mode was enhanced with cinematic sound, video, animation, and visual cues — helps teams recognize that agents will work with them, not replace them.

But Akshay Bhargava, vice president of product management for Cisco’s AI Software and Platform organization, stressed that as welcoming as such voices may be, it’s what’s behind the characters that is truly game changing.

“Galaxy Mode definitely had a fun personality, he said, “and it made AI much more approachable and engaging for customers. But the innovation is the real breakthrough, especially the innovation around reasoning and orchestration, and taking actions. It’s about using a natural language interface to help solve complex IT problems; that’s where the real magic happens.”

Galaxy Mode was embraced with great enthusiasm. And Cisco plans other enlivening characters for AI Assistant in the future.

“Galaxy Mode helped turn AI Assistant from something customers have heard about into something they wanted to experience,” Ravichandran said. “But while they came for the fun, they stayed for the powerful, real-life AI capabilities.

IT’s ‘best friend’

All of which is just in time for overburdened IT teams strapped with complexity and security threats that outpace humans’ ability to comprehend or respond. But with solutions like Cisco IQ, Cisco Cloud Control, and Cisco AgenticOps — together with the Cisco AI Assistant — AI for IT is getting much more intuitive, interactive, and proactive.

“AI is great at removing the tedium from the network engineer,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. And I think for those engineers that look at AI as a big threat to the job, you're thinking about it wrong. AI is now your best friend.”

A best friend that’s almost human (or charmingly extraterrestrial) in its communications.

“The internet,” Kerravala continued, “democratizes access to information. AI democratizes access to expertise. And agentic interfaces like what Cisco is offering make it that much easier to access that expertise. Now, you still need domain knowledge. If I don't know a router from a switch, I'm probably not going to be too effective querying it. But for those that do have the domain knowledge, this kind of agentic interface becomes an invaluable teammate.”

Unraveling a tangled web of complexity

No matter how deep one’s domain knowledge, managing a modern network environment can be overwhelming.

“The complexity of what we are dealing with today has increased substantially,” Bhargava said. “Part of it is because attackers can also use AI. But there’s a number of other dimensions. The infrastructure is now much more distributed. You have cloud, you have applications and SaaS, you have a variety of data centers, remote users, APIs, and agents. That environment is not only bigger, but also spans different domains — whether networking, security, identity, applications, observability, they’re all interconnected.”

When combined with Cisco’s platform advantage — spanning and integrating all those domains — agentic AI provides a unique solution to managing layers of complexity.

“The combination of networking, security, compute, and observability with Splunk,” said Kerravala, “you're not going to find that with another vendor.”

Of course, adding a friendly, conversational dimension makes it all that much easier. Bob Lallibert, principal analyst at theCUBE Research, referenced yet another beloved sci-fi franchise. “Having that natural language interface is easier than thinking for a lot of people,” he said. “And we're getting close to that Star Trek moment where you're just talking to the computer, and it’s talking back. I always look for how the consumerization of technology helps drive it into the enterprise. People are used to talking to Alexa, talking to Siri. And it’s moving into IT. There's going to be a curve, but the more teams start using it, they're going to really appreciate it.”

At the same time, Galaxy Mode demonstrated the speed at which products, features, and new innovations can be developed and deployed — thanks, of course, to AI.

“Galaxy Mode went from idea to code in just six weeks,” Ravichandran recounted. “Marketing came up with the idea. We validated the idea with product and engineering. And we built it within six weeks. How cool is that?”

Building trust, towards a better future

In Cisco’s 2026 AI Readiness Index, trust was seen as a top impediment to AI adoption. A key part of ensuring that trust must start with the technology itself. Security, privacy, and resilience must be woven in the fabric from the start.

“In the age of agentic AI,” said Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, “trust cannot be treated as a feature layered on at the end. It has to be built into the foundation."

At the same time, trust depends on humans setting boundaries and maintaining governance of AI, as Cisco’s industry-standard Responsible AI Framework emphasizes.

“AI agents have tremendous memory, they have tremendous access, and have agency and autonomy,” Bhargava said. “But at the end of the day, the human has to build trust in the agent, has to guide the agent, has to train the agent, has to oversee what the agent does, and stop it if it goes off the rails. So, this is where building that trusted partnership is key.”

Enabling agentic AI and humans to thrive is a multi-faceted effort, and natural-language interface is just one element. But if it’s done right IT — and the world — will benefit greatly.

“The future of networking that we are building at Cisco will feel very different,” Ravichandran predicted. “Customers are starting to see the attraction. What they get is earlier insight, much clearer context, and very fast resolution.”

That future success depends on humans and AI collaborating to solve some of our biggest challenges in IT and beyond — while communicating in the most natural ways (with or without extraterrestrial voices).

“The future isn’t humans versus AI,” Bhargava concluded, “it’s about humans working alongside trusted AI agents to solve problems together that neither one could solve as effectively on their own. It really is a better together story.”