GoKawiil“The intelligence is already there. What is missing is the connective tissue that turns four strangers into one team,” explains Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president and general manager of Outshift by Cisco.
This “connective tissue” comes from adding a semantic layer—what Outshift calls the “Internet of Cognition”—that enables agents across domains to work together and, critically, “think” together through shared intent, context, and reasoning.
This semantic layer relies on a connectivity layer beneath it called the “Internet of Agents,” which allows autonomous agents to discover one another, prove identity, and exchange messages across domains.
When used together, they enable “the next step on the road to distributed artificial superintelligence,” says Pandey.
From solo silicon savants to the ‘Internet of Cognition’
For years, the AI industry has been focused on growth. Scaling vertically has led to bigger models, trained on more data with more compute. This has produced the reasoning capabilities that can be like a “brain” for AI agents, which can perceive, reason, and act in digital environments.
While vertical scaling can produce more capable agents perpetually, to enable agentic problem solving across different systems, companies, and platforms the next axis of scale must be horizontal, says Pandey.
Multi-agent systems are already being explored in areas like software engineering, drug discovery, and scientific simulations, but their performances so far have been underwhelming. One study finds a failure rate of between 41% and around 87% when evaluating seven open-source multi-agent systems.
“Connected agents handle coordinated action well; taking a task whose shape they have seen, divided and passed around,” Pandey explains. “What they cannot do is hold a goal in common and reason toward something none of them was trained to solve.”