Outshift by Cisco is developing a semantic layer called the 'Internet of Cognition' to enable AI agents across different domains to work together and 'think' collectively. This layer is built on a connectivity layer known as the 'Internet of Agents,' which allows autonomous agents to discover one another, prove identity, and exchange messages across domains. Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president and general manager of Outshift by Cisco, described this as 'the next step on the road to distributed artificial superintelligence.'
The project, AGNTCY, is an open-source initiative under the Linux Foundation. It allows agents from different systems, companies, and platforms to find each other, verify their identities, and communicate through standardized protocols. This creates a semantic layer that enables agents to align goals, pool institutional knowledge, and make collective trade-offs. Pandey compared this progression to the development of human civilization, where sharing intent and building cumulative knowledge led to collective advancement.
Pandey emphasized that the gap in multi-agent systems is architectural, not a prompting problem. Without the right coordination layer, naive multi-agent setups can perform worse than a single agent. The step change is that a team of agents can converge on a new problem without human intervention. Outshift's Mycelium, an open-source coordination layer, helps agents agree on goals, surface missing information, and resolve conflicts before acting, improving decision-making rates from 33% to 93% in internal testing.
Source: mittr
