AI agents can connect together, but they cannot think together. That’s a huge difference and a bottleneck for next-gen systems, says Outshift by Cisco’s SVP and GM Vijoy Pandey.As he describes the current state of AI: Agents can be stitched together in a workflow or plug into a supervisor model — but there’s no semantic alignment, no shared context. They’re essentially working from scratch each go-around. This calls for next-level infrastructure, or what Pandey describes as the “internet of cognition.” “Agents are not able to think together because connection is not cognition,” he said. “We need to get to a point where you are sharing cognition. That is the greater unlock.”Creating new protocols to support next-gen agent communicationSo what is shared cognition? It’s when AI agents or entities can meaningfully work together to solve for something net new that they weren’t trained for, and do it “100% without human intervention,” Pandey said on the latest episode of Beyond the Pilot.The Cisco exec analogizes it to human intelligence. Humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, first becoming intelligent individually, then communicating on a basic level (with gestures or drawings). That communication improved over time, eventually unlocking a ‘cognitive revolution’ and collective intelligence that allowed for shared intent and the ability to coordinate, negotiate, and ground and discover information. “Shared intent, shared context, collective innovation: That’s the exact trajectory that’s playing out in silicon today,” Pandey said. His team sees it as a “horizontal distributed assistance problem.” They are pursuing “distributed super intelligence” by codifying intent, context, and collective innovation as a set of rules, APIs, and capabilities within the infrastructure itself. Their appr …
