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  "path": "/article/4136618/from-packets-to-prompts-what-ciscos-aitech-certification-means-for-it-pros.html",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-24T20:08:12.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.networkworld.com",
  "tags": [
    "Artificial Intelligence, Careers, Data Center, Networking",
    "AI Technical Practitioner (AITECH)",
    "Cisco Live EMEA",
    "Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE)",
    "Par Merat",
    "AI Solutions on Cisco Infrastructure Essentials learning path",
    "AITECH certification"
  ],
  "textContent": "Cisco’s new AI Technical Practitioner (AITECH) certification marks a key moment in AI’s transition from an interesting experiment to a core technical requirement.\n\nUnveiled at Cisco Live EMEA, the AITECH certification reinforces the idea that AI is a core skill for mainstream IT professionals, not just data scientists and ML researchers. AI is now part of the infrastructure job versus something that lives off to the side in an innovation lab.\n\nFor decades, Cisco certifications have been the gold standard for network professionals who want to validate an in-depth knowledge of networking, not just Cisco technology. In fact, the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) is one of the hardest to get and most sought-after certifications in all of tech. With AITECH, Cisco is using its position as a trainer to bring better practical AI knowledge to the technical people who will use it in their day-to-day jobs.\n\nMany industry watchers, including me, have stated that AI won’t take most technical jobs—rather, it’s people who know how to use AI that will. If that’s true, reskilling is imperative, but there hasn’t been a great path for industry professionals to follow to attain those AI skills. That’s the gap Cisco is trying to fill.\n\n## Cisco AITECH explained\n\nAt its core, AITECH is a role-oriented certification that validates the ability to embed AI into day-to-day technical work: coding, data analysis, automation, and workflow design. Rather than teaching candidates to build models from scratch, it focuses on using existing AI capabilities to modernize how infrastructure and operation teams deliver outcomes.\n\nThe associated exam, Cisco AI Technical Practitioner (800-110 AITECH) v1.0, is a 60-minute test that measures skills in several key areas: generative AI models, prompt engineering, AI ethics and security, data research and analysis, AI for code and workflow optimization, and agentic AI. The learning path is delivered through Cisco U. and includes hands-on labs and simulations that show practical use cases across Cisco and multivendor environments.\n\nCisco positions the AITECH learning path as a bridge from “traditional knowledge-based work” to innovation-driven roles augmented by AI, explicitly targeting professionals who need to design technical solutions, automate tasks, and lead teams using modern AI tools and methodologies. The curriculum spans AI-assisted code generation, AI-driven data analysis, model customization (including RAG), and workflow automation wrapped in governance and security best practices.\n\n## Why this certification matters now\n\nThe timing of AITECH aligns with the reality facing most IT organizations: AI is already creeping into operations, security, networking, and collaboration, but skills lag badly. Cisco explicitly describes AITECH as meant to “close the AI skills gap” and prepare technical staff to confidently embed AI into daily operations and drive adoption inside their organizations.\n\nInstead of creating yet another “AI expert” badge, Cisco is acknowledging that:\n\n  * AI is becoming a first-class consumer of infrastructure resources, from GPUs to storage to high-bandwidth networking.\n  * Network and infrastructure teams need to understand AI workflows well enough to support and optimize them, not just keep the pipes up.\n  * Everyday technical tasks—writing code, troubleshooting, analyzing logs, creating reports—can be materially improved by AI if practitioners know how to use it safely and effectively.\n\n\n\nIn that context, AITECH is less about learning isolated AI theory and more about hardening the applied AI skills that will define the next generation of infrastructure roles. For enterprises staring down a flood of AI projects, having a common competency baseline around prompt engineering, ethics, data practices, and automation is increasingly nonnegotiable.\n\nAt Cisco Live, I caught up with Par Merat, vice president of learning at Cisco, and we talked about this certification and the thought process behind it.\n\n“We are focused on reskilling engineers around AI and how that can help them with their current jobs while preparing for the future,” Merat said. “This looks at every aspect of running a network—from initial design to day-to-day operations to troubleshooting and optimization.”\n\n“We introduced the AI Solutions on Cisco Infrastructure Essentials learning path last year, and we have had tremendous interest and expect the same with this,” she added.\n\n## Who should care about AITECH\n\nCisco’s own targeting for AITECH reads like a roster of this core Network World audience: IT and network engineers, data analysts, AIOps specialists, solutions architects, technical leads, managers, and business process analysts. In practice, three groups should be especially interested.\n\n  1. **Infrastructure and network engineers**\nThese are the people being asked to “make AI work” in environments that were never designed for GPU-heavy, latency-sensitive workloads. AITECH gives them enough understanding of AI models, data flows, and security implications to design and operate infrastructure that is AI-ready—without forcing them to become full-time data scientists.\n  2. **Ops, AIOps, and automation teams**\nOperations teams are drowning in data and repetitive tasks, making them natural beneficiaries of AI-driven automation. The certification’s emphasis on AI-assisted code and workflow optimization, agentic AI, and data analysis directly maps to building smarter runbooks, automated remediation, and more intelligent observability and pipeline-driven automation.\n  3. **Technical leaders and architects**\nFor architects and technical managers, AITECH offers a structured way to understand how AI can be safely woven into existing architectures and processes. Topics like AI ethics, security, and governance help leaders create guardrails while still encouraging experimentation and innovation across teams.\n\n\n\nTraining providers outside Cisco echo this positioning, describing the certification as a minimum requirement for technical roles that involve AI-driven automation, data analytics, and solution design in modern enterprises.\n\n## How AITECH fits Into Cisco’s broader AI strategy\n\nThe AITECH certification is not meant to exist in isolation. Rather, it’s part of a broader AI-centric pivot in Cisco’s portfolio and learning ecosystem. Cisco has outlined an AI Infrastructure track that includes both the AI Technical Practitioner and the Cisco AI Infrastructure Specialist certification (which is tied into the existing CCNP Data Center path).\n\nWhere AITECH focuses on applied AI skills across workflows and tools, the AI Infrastructure Specialist targets engineers, architects, operations teams, and service providers responsible for deploying, operating, and troubleshooting AI workloads on Cisco data center infrastructure at scale. Cisco recommends an “AI Solutions on Cisco Infrastructure Essentials” learning path on Cisco U. ahead of that specialist exam, underscoring how deeply AI is being woven into the traditional infrastructure curriculum.\n\nCisco has also publicly framed infrastructure, trust, and model development as the three main AI challenges, emphasizing the need for robust networks, secure data handling, and safe AI adoption. AITECH addresses two of those pillars directly—operationalizing AI on modern infrastructure and building trusted, governed AI workflows—while the infrastructure specialist certification doubles down on the hardware and platform side.\n\n## What AITECH signals for Cisco\n\nFor Cisco as a company, AITECH is strategically important for several reasons. First, it reinforces Cisco’s story that its value in the AI era goes beyond hardware speeds and feeds to include skills, platforms, and end-to-end solutions. By building AI into its certification stack, Cisco is training an ecosystem of practitioners who are comfortable using AI-powered tooling across networking, security, collaboration, and observability products.\n\nSecond, it helps Cisco make good on its AI-centric messaging around customer experience and secure networking in the AI era. Cisco has been clear that it wants to centralize customer experience around AI and position its portfolio as a foundation for AI-driven operations. Having a formally trained practitioner base is essential to delivering on that promise in the field. If Cisco is going to be “critical infrastructure for the AI era,” the people who work with that technology need the skills to deploy and operate it.\n\nThird, it creates a new entry point into the Cisco learning universe at a time when many early-in-career professionals are more attracted to AI roles than classic infrastructure tracks. AITECH offers those candidates a way into AI-adjacent roles that still leverage Cisco’s platforms, effectively future-proofing the relevance of Cisco certifications in a market that is rapidly reskilling around AI.\n\n## What IT pros should watch for next\n\nFor IT leaders and practitioners, the emergence of AITECH and the broader AI Infrastructure track is a sign to start thinking about AI skills as part of your core certification strategy, not a side project. Here are a few practical implications:\n\n  * Expect AI literacy to become table stakes in job descriptions for network, data center, and operations roles, with certifications like AITECH cited as proof points.\n  * Plan for AI-augmented workflows—code, analysis, troubleshooting—to become the norm, meaning teams without applied AI skills will move slower and deliver less value.\n  * Anticipate vendor stacks, including Cisco’s, to increasingly bundle AI capabilities into infrastructure and management platforms, making practitioner-level AI skills essential to unlock full value.\n\n\n\nIn other words, Cisco’s AI Technical Practitioner certification is less about creating a new niche specialist and more about redefining what it means to be a “technical practitioner” in the first place. For this audience, that makes AITECH worth watching—not just as another logo on a résumé, but as an indicator of where infrastructure careers, and Cisco’s strategy, are headed next.",
  "title": "From packets to prompts: What Cisco’s AITECH certification means for IT pros"
}