Latest news with #CiscoLive
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Cisco's Winning AI Formula: Real CX Problems, Practical Solutions
Companies with the best customer experience focus on consistency, clarity, and a mindset of continual improvement. Most enterprise AI initiatives fail not because the technology doesn't work but because companies chase broad or ill-defined use cases instead of addressing a real problem. For example, many organizations have built chatbots that wow in demos but frustrate users in practice. Liz Centoni, Cisco's Chief Customer Experience Officer When Liz Centoni, Cisco's Chief Customer Experience Officer, talks about solving "boring problems," she's not being modest—she's highlighting a fundamental truth about artificial intelligence that most companies miss. While the tech world obsesses over flashy AI demos and theoretical capabilities, Cisco quietly built practical and measurable AI use cases that make it easier for its enterprise customers to use and troubleshoot their Cisco environments. "We're solving the most boring problems that are instrumental to our customers' operational environments—problems everybody's been circling around for years," Centoni explained during an industry analyst breakout at the Cisco Live conference in San Diego. What are examples of these "boring" problems? Configuration errors that cause 25% of all support cases. Network professionals spending up to 50% of their time on manual tasks and minimizing security breaches caused by human error. The results speak volumes: Cisco has achieved a 22-25% decrease in low-severity support cases and a 10% reduction in high-severity cases year-over-year. Additionally, its AI-powered renewal process has reduced the time its customer success teams spend on data gathering from 40% to under 5%, freeing them to focus on actual customer relationships. By addressing the low-hanging fruit of basic support issues, Cisco can focus its support teams' time on more complex problems while also enhancing its sales process. During her Cisco Live keynote, Centoni shared that Cisco's customer experience strategy centers on three core areas that any company can adapt to its customer experience challenges: The most tangible impact comes from what Cisco calls "services as code"—integrating AI-powered testing into deployment pipelines to catch configuration errors before they cause outages. "We can envision a future where we go from configuration chaos to configuration confidence," Centoni explained. This isn't just about finding defects. The system proactively validates configurations against established best practices and operational requirements specific to each customer's environment. One customer who adopted this approach summarized the value: "Security, resiliency, consistency—you delivered all three." The broader lesson: AI's value often lies not in replacing human decision-making but in preventing the human errors that cause the most expensive problems. Cisco recognized that customers were drowning in multiple interfaces and disconnected tools. Like many large technology vendors, Cisco aims to simplify the customer experience (CX) by offering a unified, AI-powered interface that provides a "hyper-personalized view into your entire Cisco environment," as Centoni described it. This interface doesn't just aggregate information—it understands context. It can identify which devices are approaching end-of-support, suggest remediation scripts for security vulnerabilities, and even generate compliance reports tailored to specific regulatory requirements. The key insight: AI's real power in simplification comes not from hiding complexity but from making complex information actionable and relevant to each user's specific context. Personalization isn't a new concept, but it's proven elusive in both consumer and B2B sales. Cisco has created what they call an "adoption agent" that digitalizes customer intent and creates personalized onboarding journeys. Rather than providing a standard set of features, the system aligns adoption with each customer's specific goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). "We're digitizing the customer's intent, the KPIs, the outcomes, and then we're helping them adopt the features that tie up to that intent, not just a whole standard set of features," Centoni explained. Breaking down data siloes was a key theme of most technology vendor's presentations in this spring's technology conference circuit. Cisco also showcased how AI could help the company connect and analyze data across various sources. This strategy represents a shift from product-centric to outcome-centric customer success enabled by AI's ability to process and connect disparate data sources. In 2025, a technology conference can't be complete without sharing a vision for Agentic AI. Cisco was no exception. While there is still some debate over the definitions of Agentic AI, most technology companies define it as a system of AI agents 'designed to act autonomously, making decisions and taking actions to achieve goals with limited human oversight. Unlike generative AI, which focuses on creating content, agentic AI focuses on doing by executing tasks and solving problems. It perceives its environment, reasons about it, and acts upon it, often without direct human intervention." Agentic AI concept is both empowering and terrifying to organizations that want to reap the productivity of agents but need to minimize the risk of fully autonomous workflows. During the analyst conference at Cisco Live, Centoni shared a balanced approach to moving into Agentic AI. She said, "We want our teams to think about it as augmentation," Centoni emphasized. "I would love to be in a space where instead of asking for an intern to help them do their job, everyone in my team could spin up an agent to be able to help them with tasks." Agentic AI agents can operate like capable colleagues, understanding their context, making informed decisions, and coordinating multiple tasks to achieve a goal. Carlos Pereira, Cisco's Fellow and Chief Architect for Customer Experience, explained the distinction: "The way we look at it is the way we have been using traditional AI as a tool. The way we expect to use agentic AI is where it becomes a teammate." This shift from tool to teammate enables what the technology industry refers to as "ambient agents"—AI systems that operate in the background, triggered by events rather than direct commands. As Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain (a key partner for Cisco in building these systems), described during the Cisco Live keynote: "We define ambient agents as agents that are triggered by events, run in the background, but they're not completely autonomous." The power of this approach becomes clear in practice. Instead of a customer reporting a network issue and waiting for a human to diagnose it, Cisco's ambient agents can detect the problem in real-time, analyze historical data and best practices, and provide personalized recommendations—all before the customer even knows there's an issue. While Cisco's efficiency gains are impressive, the real return on investment extends beyond traditional metrics. Centoni noted that customer satisfaction consistently improves when solutions are found through AI-enabled methods. AI will also change the nature of work itself at Cisco. "Reducing cognitive load and friction enables my teams to get more creative in how we solve our customers' problems," Centoni observed. "They can use that (extra) time for learning. They can use that time to balance work and life." Agentic AI offers significant potential business impact, where AI not only enhances existing processes but also enables entirely new ways of creating value. When routine tasks are automated, human workers can focus on the complex, creative problem-solving that drives real competitive advantage. Cisco also offers practical lessons for any organization looking to transform customer experience with AI: Rather than asking, "What can AI do for us?" Cisco asked, "What problems do our customers and employees face every day?" This question led Cisco to focus on configuration errors, manual tasks, and data silos—initial use cases that may seem unglamorous but can deliver high impact rapidly. "We are thinking about autonomous in terms of tasks that augment what our teams do," Centoni emphasized. This approach reduces resistance, maintains quality control, and often delivers better results than fully automated systems. Over time, there will be opportunities to have more autonomous systems; however, Cisco's strategy offers a more pragmatic approach to minimizing risk today. Unlike traditional software that follows a "build it, ship it, maintain it" cycle, AI systems require continuous improvement. "It's build it, improve the accuracy of it... it's continuous learning," Centoni noted. Businesses need to design processes for ongoing feedback and refinement. With customer relationships at stake, Cisco maintains human oversight at critical decision points. "The decision is never up to the agent, per se. The decision is up to the human at the end of the day," Centoni explained. The balance between AI capability and human control builds trust with both employees and customers. While cost savings matter, the real value lies in enabling new capabilities. Cisco's agents don't just handle support cases faster—they can predict and prevent issues that would never have been caught manually. Cisco's vision extends beyond current capabilities to what Centoni calls "intelligent anticipation"—systems that understand customer environments so deeply that they can resolve problems before customers are even aware of them. "Our goal, whether it's a customer who spends a few thousand dollars or a customer who spends a few billion dollars with us: we want them to feel like they're our only customer because we know their environment. We know them so well, sometimes even better than they do themselves," Centoni explained. The vision of hyper-personalized, predictive customer experience represents the true promise of AI in business—not replacing human relationships but making them more meaningful by removing friction and adding intelligence to every interaction.
Business Wire
5 days ago
- Business Wire
Quantum Xchange Releases Virtual Container Key Management Solution for Post-Quantum Cryptography
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today at Cisco Live, Cisco's annual IT and communications conference, Quantum Xchange announced that its Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) key management solution, Phio TX ®, is now available as a virtual container. The new form factor, Phio TX-EM, is compatible with Cisco networking operating systems IOS XE, IOS XR, as well as the Nexus NX-OS operating system, which will allow Cisco networking users to harden their infrastructure and easily migrate to NIST-standard PQC with no network downtime or performance degradation. 'Our support for Cisco's SKIP protocol and network operating systems is just the latest example of how Quantum Xchange is working to offer their customers, and the market, a practical path to quantum readiness while hardening their infrastructure today,' Share Phio TX supports standard key management protocols, such as SKIP and ETSI, enabling drop-in integration without changes to existing router configurations. It is also one of the first products to receive NIST certification for the latest FIPS 140-3 cryptographic module standard and FIPS 203 validation supporting all ML-KEM algorithms for post-quantum security. Compatible with Cisco IOS XE and XR routers supporting containers such as Cisco Catalyst 8000v, NCS 540 and Nexus switches with containers, Phio TX-EM provides over-the-network provisioning, installation, configuration and distribution of Phio TX key management as an integrated process within the network itself. With Phio TX-EM, SKIP key requests are kept within the cryptographic boundary of the device, making the SKIP PQC implementation secure by eliminating the possibility of data leakage due to weakly configured external SKIP calls. Only FIPS-validated PQC key exchanges are passed between devices. Moreover, Phio TX does not rely on pre-shared or static keys. It uses ephemeral keys, dynamically generated in-memory and deleted after use. A strong symmetric key is created and travels out-of-band, independent of the encrypted data thereby avoiding harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) and man-in-the-middle attack scenarios. Download the Phio TX-EM data sheet for a complete inventory of product features. 'Our support for Cisco's SKIP protocol and network operating systems is just the latest example of how Quantum Xchange is working to offer their customers, and the market, a practical path to quantum readiness while hardening their infrastructure today,' said Antonio Sanchez, Chief Strategy Officer at Quantum Xchange. 'Phio TX's crypto-agile features and capabilities deployed as a virtual container, offers customers choice and flexibility for meeting the unique data security requirements of their organization while easily upgrading their network infrastructure to quantum safety with zero static keys, zero downtime, and zero added latency.' Quantum Xchange demoed Phio TX and its various deployment options in the Security & Networking Village at Cisco Live, where the best and brightest minds in IT come together to learn, share knowledge, and connect. To view the presentation delivered to event attendees in San Diego, June 8-12, 2025, 'Fast Track to Post-Quantum Security' go to the Cisco Live website. About Quantum Xchange Quantum Xchange protects confidential and classified data from advances in computing and everyday cybersecurity risks. Its award-winning key management platform, Phio TX empowers organizations to bring existing IT infrastructures into the post-quantum era easily and affordably with an innovative, secure, and flexible architecture. Commercial enterprises and government agencies can leverage trusted standards for quantum-safe protection, embrace crypto-agility, and establish a cryptographic center of excellence with no network or application downtime and no performance degradation. To learn more visit
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Cisco fortifies enterprise networking gear to support AI workloads
This story was originally published on CIO Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CIO Dive newsletter. Cisco rolled out a series of hardware upgrades designed to ease enterprise AI adoption, including retooled networking components, a unified network management platform and the Deep Network Model domain-specific large language model to power an AI assistant, the company said Tuesday at its annual Cisco Live conference in San Diego. 'As AI transforms work, it fuels explosive traffic growth across campus, branch and industrial networks, overwhelming IT teams with complexity and novel security risks at a time when downtime has never been more costly,' Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco, said in the announcement. Cisco's portfolio overhaul comes as CIOs grapple with infrastructure limitations and safety concerns inherent in AI deployments, according to Matt Eastwood, IDC SVP of enterprise infrastructure. 'The reality is that existing enterprise networks are simply not equipped to handle the scale, security and reliability requirements that AI demands,' Eastwood said in the announcement. Cisco is banking on enterprises taking a hybrid route to AI adoption. The LLMs that power off-the-shelf chatbots, copilots and AI assistants are trained on high-capacity chips in massive cloud data centers but enterprises need secure networks to connect models to their data. The company signaled an enterprise IT shift last month, after surpassing its fiscal year 2025 goal of $1 billion in hyperscaler AI networking gear orders in its third quarter, which ended on April 26. 'On the tail-end of building out all the public cloud infrastructure for training, there is a significantly larger opportunity in enterprise AI, as they build out the capability to do inferencing inside their own data centers,' Cisco EVP and CFO Scott Herren said during the Q3 2025 earnings call. Cisco saw revenue increase 11% to $14.1 billion, with networking revenue growing 8% year over year. Switches and enterprise routing equipment led the segment with double-digit growth, Herren said. As AI infrastructure build outs reach into the enterprise, Cisco has tightened its alliance with GPU chipmaker Nvidia. The two companies agreed to collaborate on an integrated architecture for AI-ready enterprise data center networks in February and announced Tuesday that Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU is available in Cisco servers. In addition to training a network-savvy AI agent trained on Cisco specifications and courseware to detect anomalies, diagnose problems and automate workflows, the company is designing routers, switches and other networking gear for a growing class of agentic tools, Patel said during a briefing last week. 'There'll be tens of billions of agents conducting work on our behalf,' said Patel. 'To get all this to happen, the fundamental requirements around infrastructure, as well as safety and security, will need to be completely rethought, because the classical ways that infrastructure was handled just won't be able to deal with the scale and proportion that we're talking about — that's why you're seeing such a massive level of build out globally of data center capacity.' The largest hyperscaler by market share, AWS, committed $20 billion to AI infrastructure buildouts in Pennsylvania on Monday. The company announced plans for a $10 billion data center construction project in North Carolina last week. Enterprises are eager to shore up on-site infrastructure, too. Nearly 9 in 10 organizations plan to expand compute capacity to run AI workloads, according to a Sandpiper Research and Insights survey of more than 8,000 senior IT and business leaders commissioned by Cisco. More than three-quarters of respondents said their organization had suffered a major network outage due to congestion, cyberattack or misconfiguration. 'The consequence of us not getting this infrastructure piece right is pretty profound,' Patel said. 'What we want to do is have people not have to think about infrastructure.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Trade Arabia
6 days ago
- Business
- Trade Arabia
Cisco powers secure infrastructure for the AI era
Cisco today (June 11) unveiled new innovations to help companies adapt and transform in the artificial intelligence (AI) era. Enterprises are under pressure to accelerate secure AI adoption and drive value from AI investments, said Cisco in a statement. To help organizations meet these opportunities, Cisco continues to reimagine the datacenters and workplaces of the future, it stated. "Cisco is delivering the critical infrastructure for the AI era—secure networks and experiences, optimized for AI that connect the world and power the global economy," remarked Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. "We're witnessing an unprecedented surge in innovation as organizations embrace agentic AI to automate workflows and solve complex problems. Cisco has a rich history of helping companies run their infrastructure; today, we're building on that foundation to power the next generation of AI," he added. Patrick Milligan, chief information security officer, Ford Motor Company, said: "Agentic AI is being used across Ford's business, from design to engineering to manufacturing and for customer support." "As we build, deploy, and manage sophisticated AI capabilities at scale, Cisco's networking and security solutions are an important part of the overall technology infrastructure," he explained. At Cisco Live, Cisco unveiled a wide range of new products and enhancements to help customers navigate the shift to agentic AI, including: Workplaces for the age of AI: Creating an intelligent workplace relies on modern network infrastructure that adapts to increased traffic, ensures always-on access, and delivers robust security. Meanwhile, organizations must empower people to work smarter and more effectively than ever. To meet these demands, Cisco announced new devices to power campus, branch, and industrial networks, and AI-powered unified management to help organizations move past reactive workflows to conducting autonomous, proactive network management. Simplified Operations for the age of AI with AgenticOps: Cisco is unveiling multiple AI-driven solutions to empower IT teams with simplicity, and automation, including Cisco AI Canvas, an industry-first generative user interface for real-time collaboration between network and security operations teams, and the Cisco AI Assistant, which provides conversational control across the Cisco suite. Data Centers for the age of AI: Cisco unveiled continued innovation in its compute and network solutions for datacenters to support agentic AI, which places a premium on network bandwidth, latency, and power efficiency. To help drive adoption of AI solutions to strengthen the power grid, Cisco is joining the EPRI Open Power AI Consortium. Security for the age of AI: Robust security has never been more critical, as enterprises navigate the complexity of a growing number of applications, a highly distributed and mobile workforce, and sophisticated AI-driven threats. Cisco is introducing innovations across its Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Universal Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) offerings; announced two new Firewalls, the 6100 series and 200 series. Digital Resilience at the Core: Several AI innovations, including enhanced capabilities in Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk AppDynamics, along with deeper integrations between Cisco and Splunk solutions, are helping customers gain greater visibility into network health and performance. Key updates include a bidirectional integration between Splunk Observability, Cisco ThousandEyes Assurance and Cisco Enterprise Networks, enabling more resilient, insight-driven digital operations. Unified Management for the age of AI: The company is previewing Cisco Cloud Control, a new unified management platform spanning Cisco's networking, security, and observability portfolios. Cisco Cloud Control will offer a cohesive experience anchored by AI native tools like Cisco AI Canvas, and the Cisco AI Assistant.
Web Release
6 days ago
- Business
- Web Release
Cisco Powers Secure Infrastructure for the AI Era
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today unveiled new innovations to help companies adapt and transform in the AI era. Enterprises are under pressure to accelerate secure AI adoption and drive value from AI investments. To help organizations meet these opportunities, Cisco continues to reimagine the datacenters and workplaces of the future. 'Cisco is delivering the critical infrastructure for the AI era—secure networks and experiences, optimized for AI that connect the world and power the global economy,' said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. 'We're witnessing an unprecedented surge in innovation as organizations embrace agentic AI to automate workflows and solve complex problems. Cisco has a rich history of helping companies run their infrastructure; today, we're building on that foundation to power the next generation of AI.' Patrick Milligan, chief information security officer, Ford Motor Company, noted, 'Agentic AI is being used across Ford's business, from design to engineering to manufacturing and for customer support.? As we build, deploy, and manage sophisticated AI capabilities at scale, Cisco's networking and security solutions are an important part of the overall technology infrastructure.' At Cisco Live, Cisco unveiled a wide range of new products and enhancements to help customers navigate the shift to agentic AI, including: Workplaces for the age of AI: Creating an intelligent workplace relies on modern network infrastructure that adapts to increased traffic, ensures always-on access, and delivers robust security. Meanwhile, organizations must empower people to work smarter and more effectively than ever. To meet these demands, Cisco announced new devices to power campus, branch, and industrial networks, and AI-powered unified management to help organizations move past reactive workflows to conducting autonomous, proactive network management. Additionally, Cisco's AI-powered Room Vision PTZ camera transforms meetings for a more cinematic experience. The Jira Workflow Automation in the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Suite boosts efficiency, while the Webex AI Agent streamlines customer self-service with industry-specific templates. Read more here: The AI-Ready Enterprise: Building the Intelligent Workplace with Cisco Simplified Operations for the age of AI with AgenticOps: Cisco is unveiling multiple AI-driven solutions to empower IT teams with simplicity, and automation, including Cisco AI Canvas, an industry-first generative user interface for real-time collaboration between network and security operations teams, and the Cisco AI Assistant, which provides conversational control across the Cisco suite. Core to the new capabilities is Cisco's Deep Network Model — a domain-specific LLM trained on Cisco's vast knowledge base, including Cisco U. courseware and Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) materials. The result is AI that understands networks and helps IT teams work more efficiently. Read more here: Welcome to the Agentic Era: People + Agents Achieving More, Together Security for the age of AI: Robust security has never been more critical, as enterprises navigate the complexity of a growing number of applications, a highly distributed and mobile workforce, and sophisticated AI-driven threats. Cisco is introducing innovations across its Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Universal Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) offerings; announced two new Firewalls, the 6100 series and 200 series, providing customers with best-in-class price performance; and unveiled capabilities across the Cisco Security Cloud to help customers meet the challenges of securing agentic AI. Read more here: Making Agentic AI Work in the Real World and Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall: Better Enforcement Points, Smarter Segmentation, and Multi-Vendor Policy Digital Resilience at the Core: Several AI innovations, including enhanced capabilities in Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk AppDynamics, along with deeper integrations between Cisco and Splunk solutions, are helping customers gain greater visibility into network health and performance. Key updates include a bidirectional integration between Splunk Observability, Cisco ThousandEyes Assurance and Cisco Enterprise Networks, enabling more resilient, insight-driven digital operations. Read more here: Cisco and Splunk Strengthen Enterprise Digital Resilience in the AI Era
