Cisco's Pandey: in multi-agent work, value sits in handoffs that someone must check

Vijoy Pandey, who leads Outshift by Cisco, argued on The Cognitive Revolution that when several AI agents work on one problem, the value is not inside any single agent. It sits in the handoffs between them and in the result for the whole company. His example was the person at a deal desk who checks that everyone stays aligned.

What was said

Pandey described a deal worth a couple of million dollars. Sales, legal, finance, product and engineering, and marketing all take part. He pictured agents from different vendors in these roles. In the middle sits a general manager who keeps everyone aligned. He called that person a verifier and said no one person owns the whole problem.

He said: "the value in this system is not sitting within one particular agent." In his account, the value lies in the handoffs and in a global outcome for the enterprise. He also showed how a handoff can go wrong. A rough estimate can turn into a commitment. That commitment can become contract language, and marketing can then repeat it as a claim.

Pandey said today's dashboards mostly show whether agents are up and running. They do not show whether the agents agree on the goal. His team saw a system that was 66% up, which counted as working perfectly. Its task completion was 0%. "Your dashboards might be green, but your outcomes might be wrong, completely wrong," he said.

Cisco is open-sourcing a tool called Scope to expose this. It reads OpenTelemetry traces, an open standard that he said every application uses. On top of them it adds a layer that shows where meaning breaks between agents.

Why it matters

Our reading: if agents draft the contract, set the price and write the claim, the scarce skill moves from producing each piece to judging what passes between them. A verifier must know enough law, finance and product to spot an estimate hardening into a promise. That breadth is hard to build if people only ever work inside one function.

For buyers of agent software, the practical question is who owns the global outcome. Pandey's example suggests that uptime dashboards do not prove the work is done.

The other side

Pandey did not say the verifier job is safe. He said it is mostly a human in the loop today, but it could also be a supervisor agent at some point. So the model worker he describes may itself be automated.

The excerpts say nothing about how people would be trained for this role, or how many would be needed. Pandey also speaks for a company releasing tools in this area. His example is one deal, described by him, not a measured result across many firms.