Cisco enters the AI game

Cisco is betting big on Artificial Intelligence. It’s clear that AI assistants are a priority for all of the company’s divisions. The Collaboration division’s Intelligent Assistant – which has been available for three years – has paved the way for rapid progress in AI assistant implementation across the company. Now, the other divisions need to get their customers to use these new AI Assistants. Cisco Live 2024 showcased Cisco’s commitment to AI Assistants across its entire product portfolio.

During the event, the Collaboration division unveiled three significant additions to its AI Assistants portfolio:

• Enhanced intelligence in Webex devices: the ability to command Cisco devices – through generative AI and the Control Hub administration interface – makes Cisco unique in the industry. Some of the features include voice commands and AI-driven camera visualisations – that’s just the start. Others in the video conferencing market need to take note, as these features mean big benefits for users and administrators.

• AI Assistant for Contact Centre: This intelligent assistant empowers contact centre agents with real-time insights and guidance, improving customer interactions and simplifying workflows.

• AI assistant for contact centre developers: this new tool provides coding assistance and automation features for contact centre developers, speeding up development cycles and improving the overall contact centre experience.

Cisco Collaboration also introduced a voice-based virtual agent, enabling natural and intuitive customer interactions. In addition, personalised dictionaries have been introduced, enabling personalised responses and tailored experiences for customers.

Cisco and Splunk have also announced new AI tools to help with decision-making:

• An AI assistant for Cisco AppDynamics, available in the third quarter of 2024.
• Tools for setting limits, managing and optimising configurations and insights with AI and machine learning in Splunk IT Service Intelligence, available now.

Cisco AppDynamics will be hosted as software-as-a-service on Microsoft Azure from the third quarter of this year, enabling compliance with industry-specific regulatory requirements in new regions.

There’s more:

• Cisco’s incubation arm, Outshift, has announced that its Generative AI deployment tool, Motific.AI, is now available. Motific empowers IT and business teams to quickly provision GenAI assistants and applications, while improving compliance with their organisation’s trust, security and cost policies. This is a hot sector, with companies selling easier ways for businesses to adopt equally modern generative AI solutions.

• The company also announced a collaboration with Mistral AI. Mistral’s model is available as a connection in the Motific sandbox. With just a few clicks, organisations with relationships with Mistral AI can quickly leverage their models in Motific to power their customised GenAI assistants and applications.

‘As we look to the future, we plan to leverage Mistral AI technology across the entire Cisco portfolio,’ explains Vijoy Pandey, VP at Outshift.

In the future, Cisco and Outshift plan to use Mistral AI products for upcoming guardrail generation, intelligence and augmented recovery capabilities in Motific. Outshift will explore the use of Mistral AI to create domain- and task-specific models in Outshift products and resources.