About Cisco
Cisco is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world.
With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience.
With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all.
The business challenge
This was Cisco’s second project with Sapio Research.
In 2024, we worked on delivering the ‘State of Industrial Networking Report’ to validate Cisco’s understanding of the market and give customers a benchmarking tool against their peers.
That 2024 report found the data was overwhelmingly indexing on AI, a clear signal that customers needed a deeper, dedicated look at how AI was playing out in their operations.
So, for 2026, Cisco wanted to take stock of how customers were experiencing AI at scale, in addition to their own macro view of the market.
They wanted to collect insights that go beyond general conversations around chatbots and agentic AI that was dominating the wider market.
Primarily, Cisco wanted to understand how physically AI embedded directly into industrial operations, and how it was reshaping customer priorities, while keeping the existing pillars of security and IT/OT collaboration alive in the narrative.
Our research approach and deliverables
For the report we designed a bespoke, double-blind global study, surveying over 1,000 operational technology decision-makers across 19 countries and 21 industrial sectors, including manufacturing, utilities, and transportation.
For the report we surveyed respondents from organisations with annual revenues of $100 million or more, ensuring the findings reflected decision-makers with genuine budget and strategic influence over industrial AI investment.
In addition to that, instead of repeating the same question set across every sector, we worked with Cisco to build a methodology that captured a consistent, comparable core of questions across all respondents, alongside sector-specific lines of enquiry tailored to each vertical.
This mattered because industrial priorities vary sharply by sector.
A security breach at a manufacturing plant is primarily a cost and downtime issue; the same breach at a utility can mean loss of power, and in the worst cases, loss of life. A single, undifferentiated question set risked masking these differences and diluting the value of the data for any one audience.
The result was a master report, comprising of the shared, global view of industrial AI adoption, alongside dedicated vertical reports for:
This structure gave Cisco a flagship asset to anchor its wider promotional strategy, while giving each industry audience a report that felt built specifically for them.
Outcomes
One research gave Cisco five distinct reports tailored to help sales conversations.
This sector-first approach paid off, as the report reached millions of views, drove hundreds of pieces of earned media coverage, and gave Cisco’s industrial sales team a conversation-opener with customers.
Media Coverage
According to Cisco’s success metrics, the 2026 report outperformed their expectations.
They attribute this to the ungated distribution model combined with customised questions to gather sector-specific knowledge. Since launching the report has:
- 3 million+ views
- 700+ earned media articles
- 60,000+ LinkedIn live views
Cisco maintains multiple pages across social channels and uses them all to cross promote industry-leading content. For the 2026 report they shared it on the ‘Cisco Industrial IoT’ LinkedIn channel, which has over 100K+ followers.
Here’s a snapshot of their LinkedIn post which included the entire report for followers to instantly read or download without the need to fill a form:
Coverage extended well beyond the trade press, with pickup from Forbes and Fortune, a result Cisco called significant given how niche the industrial AI space is compared to the broader enterprise AI conversation.
Team Impact
Cisco deliberately positioned the report as a thought-leadership asset rather than a lead-generation tool.
They framed it internally as “asset zero”, content designed to open and shape conversations rather than sit at the bottom of a sales funnel.
Cisco’s sales team extensively references the vertical reports as door openers with prospects.
And the main report is used to open keynote presentations, giving Cisco a data-backed way to frame market conditions before presenting its own response.
Internally, this new approach needed a revised process to measure success, as previously only pipeline impact was measured. But now the value is measured by the long-term impact and prospect conversations rather than transactional metrics.
Working with Sapio Research
Cisco’s experience working with Sapio Research has been overwhelmingly positive.
Olivia Vickers, Head of Revenue Marketing – Industrial IoT at Cisco, pointed to the technical depth of Sapio Research’s team as a key differentiator, noting she never once felt the team lacked expertise on a subject as niche and specific as industrial networking.
She also highlighted the collaborative process of working with us.
The consistent communication, clear visibility into where the report stood at each stage, and a level of dedication to timelines and deliverables that she described as a “white glove” experience, something she valued given how large an investment these reports represent for Cisco.
‘We love working with Sapio Research. I’ve continued to get people not only within Cisco but outside of Cisco seeing the report and ask me who I’m working with, because the report I think speaks for itself.’
