Last week at the buzz-worthy Cisco Live! Conference, a wave of excitement was generated with Cisco's announcement of several upgrades that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to augment security and simplify its collaboration product suite.
Jeetu Patel, Cisco's EVP and GM for Security and Collaboration, highlighted that AI is not a transient trend. He painted it as a core paradigm shift, expecting significant innovation in the realm.
Backing this, Cisco's 2023 State of Global Innovation Study reported that IT professionals ranked generative AI as the most influential technology for their businesses. A whopping 85% are ready for the revolution it will bring. Recognizing the crucial role generative AI will play, Cisco is all set to advance the future of work, aiming to provide hybrid workers a safer, more productive, and more efficient work experience.
Liz Centoni, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, and GM of Applications, took the stage to emphasize how pervasive AI is in Cisco's portfolio. "AI is far from being a novelty for us, it's employed to analyze and classify data, enabling outcomes like automation, baselining, vulnerability assessment, anomaly detection, and my personal favorite - noise reduction. The promise that generative AI holds is immense," Centoni stated.
Among the new AI-enhanced features for the Webex Suite are "Catch Me Up," which lets users promptly catch up on missed interactions, and intelligent meeting summaries that highlight key points and action items. Also included are enhancements to Vidcast, Cisco's video messaging tool, which will now produce summaries featuring highlights and chapters. Finally, Webex Contact Center's new conversation summaries provide a speedy, automated way for agents to digest long-form text from customer chats.
In the security sphere, the unveiling of the generative AI Policy Assistant was a standout, aimed to aid admins in creating and implementing non-conflicting policies. The Security Operations Center (SOC) Assistant is another upgrade designed to assist security analysts by providing comprehensive situation analyses, correlating intelligence across the Cisco Security Cloud platform solutions, indicating potential impacts, and recommending actions.
The new features, including Webex's summarization, policy management, and SOC Assistant Summaries, are expected to roll out by the end of 2023. Additional SOC Assistant features will hit the market in the first half of 2024.
"The attack surface is broadening at an alarming rate, and human-scale solutions no longer cut it. We need machine-scale solutions powered by AI," Patel remarked in his keynote address.
More AI integrations are in the pipeline, all guided by Cisco’s Principles for Responsible Artificial Intelligence. "Our goal with AI is not just to achieve great things but to do so responsibly," Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins stated during his keynote. It's evident that Cisco is driving forward with AI's potential, promising exciting advancements in the tech industry's horizon.
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