Over 27,000 attendees gathered this week in Las Vegas at Cisco Live 2017 to hear the latest news, expert insights and learn about the company's future direction. Here are the top stories that came out of the event. During a Facebook Live Q&A session, Rowan Trollope, senior VP and general manager of Cisco IoT and Applications, was asked about the future of Spark and artificial intelligence. "We think every meeting should have an assistant taking notes, but we can't always have that [and that's where AI comes in]," Trollope replied. "We're moving down the path of having AI assistants show up in our meeting and Spark messaging. This will make it possible to have the bots taking notes and intelligently schedule things," He said.

The world is entering yet another new era in networking, according to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, in his keynote address on Monday at Cisco Live 2017 in Las Vegas. Cisco announced its new "intent-based" networking solution last week, and Robbins discussed it in detail at Cisco Live. The network is an intuitive, artificial intelligence (AI)-based system that anticipates actions and stops security threats as it evolves and learns. It's necessary, Robbins said, because the world will soon be at a point where millions of new devices will be added to the internet every day. To create the new networking solution, Cisco rewrote 25-plus years of software.