Notes from Philip Griffith’s talk: Why Traditional Networking Fails Agentic AI

If you’ve been building anything with agents in the past year, you already know the shape of the problem even if you haven’t named it: you’ve got a model in one cloud, a vector store in another, a tool server somewhere on-prem, an MCP gateway facing the public internet, and a handful of A2A flows stitching the whole thing together. It works. Better than that, it’s exciting! Let me say this as someone who’s spent a few years in cybersecurity and the last couple of weeks elbow-deep in OpenZiti: the AI systems that we’re implementing are built on a network model that was designed before any of this stuff existed, and that network model hasn’t kept up with what we’re doing today. That was the gist of my coworker Philip Griffiths’ talk at day one of the DoW Zero Trust Symposium a couple of weeks ago. As I said, Philip works with me at NetFoundry as the Head of Strategic Sales, and his talk is titled Why Traditional Networking Fails Agentic AI: Identity-First Connectivity Matters for Zero…