Cisco Systems Inc. is doubling down on its artificial intelligence push with a host of new AI-powered products and services, plus various other initiatives focused on AI.

At its annual networking and security conference, Cisco Live 2024, the company today unveiled a new breed of AI-infused networking, observability, productivity and security offerings that stretch across its entire portfolio of products. It also announced the creation of a new, $1 billion global investment fund for AI startups that aims to build and expand on the most innovative AI systems around, plus new training initiatives to help partners and customers make the most of their AI investments.

The company kicked things off with its new AI networking products, saying they’re designed to make life easier for customers looking to implement the next generation of AI-powered applications. At the same time, the new offerings leverage AI themselves to help give customers greater visibility into their networks.

AI-infused networking infrastructure

The Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters are described as a new “AI cluster solution” delivered in partnership with Nvidia Corp., which serve as a single place for customers to design, deploy, monitor and assure their AI pods and data center workloads. With AI guidance infused through, the aim is that users will benefit from intelligent assistance in every step as they design and deploy, then implement monitoring and assurance in their AI infrastructure.

Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco Networking, said that while many companies understand the promise of AI, the path forward is a lot less clear. “Customers often face economic and operational challenges to get an AI stack up and running,” he explained. “Cisco is committed to making the deployment and operation of AI infrastructure simpler. So together with Nvidia, we are delivering a simple-to-deploy, cloud-operated AI stack solution for on-premises deployments.”

Meanwhile, Cisco says, new capabilities announced in its ThousandEyes infrastructure monitoring platform unlock “digital experience assurance” for Cisco Networking Cloud users, increasing visibility into every enterprise, cloud, software-as-a-service and internet network, so they can ensure a reliable experience for users.

In terms of security, Cisco said it’s enhancing the Cisco Security Cloud offering with dozens of new AI features spanning its firewall infrastructure and threat detection tools. The enhanced platform provides access to new sources of telemetry data uncovered by AI to deliver superior visibility into network health, as well as AI-powered network management capabilities.

International Data Corp. analyst Mark Leary said it has become imperative for companies to deliver consistently positive digital experiences for their customers and employees. But doing this is challenging, because of the increasingly complex infrastructure behind these digital experiences.

“Networks, data centers, cloud services, security mechanisms, endpoints and an ever-growing set of data and applications must all work in concert,” he said. “The industry needs simpler and smarter solutions, and the comprehensive data collection and cross-domain data correlation, driven by applied intelligence and embedded automation, stands to have a dramatic impact on IT engineering and operations as well as business execution and outcomes.”

The company also announced Cisco Hypershield Support for Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Pensando data processing units and Intel Corp.’s infrastructure processing units. They’re specialized chips designed to support infrastructure-related tasks, in order to streamline the performance of regular computing chips. With Cisco Hypershield Support, enterprises using these specialist chipsets benefit from a more distributed security architecture that extends from the cloud to on-premises data centers and the edge, the company said.

Cisco also announced some key updates to the Splunk application observability platform, combining its generative AI assistant technology and Splunk Log Observability with the Cisco AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring tool. The result is a new tool called AppDynamics Log Observer Connect, which provides customers with more meaningful guidance and insights about their applications’ performance.

AI-enhanced productivity

One of the most commonly cited benefits of generative AI is its ability to help humans work more efficiently, and Cisco is acknowledging this with the new features announced in its collaboration tool Webex today. Webex Contact Center, which is an extended version of Webex for customer service teams, is getting new AI tools that help organizations to design and manage conversational self-service experiences, with advanced AI assistants for every contact center agent. The assistants are not designed to replace human agents, but rather assist them in their interactions with customers in order to speed up the time it takes to resolve their issues.

In addition, Cisco said the AI Assistant for Webex Suite will soon become available for enterprise users. With this, information technology system administrators will be able to manage remote device access from inside the Webex Control Hub. There’s also a new Desk Reservation feature within Cisco Spaces that makes it easier for employees to book desk space and schedule the use of Cisco Collaboration Devices.

Investing in AI

With its new, $1 billion global investment fund, Cisco is putting its money where its mouth is. The company has been a vocal advocate of AI-infused systems and technologies for some time and is now aiming to fuel the development of those tools. It revealed today it has been making strategic investments in a number of prominent AI startups, including Cohere Inc., Mistral AI and Scale AI Inc., with ambitions to help those companies continue their advances in areas such as customer readiness, compute infrastructure, foundational models, AI model development and AI training.

Announcing the new fund, Cisco Chief Strategy Officer Mark Patterson spoke of his belief that Cisco is well-placed to be a key strategic partner for customers as they look to infuse AI in every aspect of their businesses. “In addition to building the essential technology to connect, secure and advanced AI, Cisco is committed to investing in the broader AI ecosystem to more effectively meet our customers’ needs,” he said.

Cisco’s investments in AI amount to more than just throwing money at the most promising startups, though, as it’s also spending money to ensure that its partners and customers have the skills required to put AI into practice.

To that end, it announced a new AI Fundamentals for Partners training program that’s designed to provide its partners with the expertise required to optimize their infrastructure for AI workloads using the company’s own tools and services. The program will explore the basics of AI, including key concepts and terms, a taxonomy of AI solutions it offers, an overview of the company’s AI strategy, plus governance and example use cases. Ultimately, the program will teach partners how to master AI implementation using the full suite of Cisco’s platforms.

For customers, the new Cisco Certification in AI program might be more interesting. It’s designed to help organizations create what Cisco calls an “AI-ready workforce” that’s familiar with modern, AI-based networking architectures. Through the program, employers, employees and job seekers will all be able to gain the skills needed to design and enable modern AI and machine learning-based computing infrastructures and networks.

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