Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy. Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives.

Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate patient care without a human making the decisions. “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.” “The gap is architectural, not a prompting problem,” Pandey adds. “Without the right coordination layer, naive multi-agent setups can perform worse than a single agent.

The step change is that team of agents converging on its own, on a new problem, with no human stitching the seams.” To reach this goal, Pandey says Outshift has built a connectivity layer called AGNTCY, an open-source project now under the Linux Foundation. AGNTCY allows agents across different systems, companies, and platforms to find each other, prove identity, and exchange messages through open, standardized protocols. And, as Pandey explains, this allows the Internet of Cognition thesis to take a step further.

It creates a semantic layer that allows agents to align goals (share intent), pool institutional knowledge and compound memory (share context), and make collective trade-offs (share reasoning). Pandey likens this progression to that of humans: “For hundreds of thousands of years humans got individually smarter, and the gains died with each person who made them,” he explains.