At Cisco Live in Las Vegas, Cisco announced a groundbreaking initiative to revolutionise the way people work using cutting-edge generative AI technology. The company plans to leverage large language models (LLMs) to drive productivity and simplicity in its Collaboration and Security portfolios, helping organisations meet the demands of hybrid work environments while ensuring robust protection against sophisticated cyber threats.
According to Cisco’s 2023 State of Global Innovation Study, generative AI is considered the technology most likely to have a significant impact on businesses, with 85% of IT professionals expressing preparedness for its effects. Recognising the vital role generative AI will play in shaping the future of work, Cisco is committed to providing hybrid workers with an efficient, secure, and highly productive work experience.
Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco, emphasised the pervasiveness of generative AI in the near future, stating, “Generative AI will quickly become pervasive as we see businesses and workers embrace the technology to become materially more productive.” Patel further revealed how Cisco has incorporated generative AI into its existing products, enabling customers to unlock the most secure and unparalleled work experiences possible.
As hybrid work becomes the new norm, employees and customers alike require collaboration experiences that empower them to perform at their best. Cisco’s Webex Suite will introduce new summarisation capabilities designed to accelerate information absorption and streamline workflows. These capabilities include:
1. “Catch Me Up”: This feature enables users to quickly catch up on missed interactions, such as meetings, calls, and chats, ensuring they stay informed and engaged.
2. Intelligent Meeting Summaries: Webex will automatically generate meeting summaries, extracting key points and action items, saving attendees and absentees valuable time. Participants no longer need to listen to lengthy recordings or read through transcripts.
3. Vidcast Highlights and Chapters: Cisco’s video messaging tool, Vidcast, will offer summaries that provide viewers with quick access to the most important parts of a video, enhancing information retrieval and engagement.
4. Conversation Summaries in Webex Contact Center: Cisco’s Contact Center will provide agents with automated conversation summaries from digital chats with customers. This functionality streamlines post-call wrap-up and resolution, ensuring agents have a clear understanding of the customer’s concerns and resolutions explored during self-service interactions.
Recognising the complexity and criticality of security operations, Cisco is investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning innovations to augment security staff, simplifying operations and improving threat response. As part of its Security Cloud vision, Cisco previewed new generative AI capabilities aimed at simplifying policy management and enhancing threat response.
Creating and managing effective security policies is a complex task in cybersecurity hygiene. Cisco’s generative AI Policy Assistant addresses this challenge by enabling security and IT administrators to describe granular security policies and determine their implementation across different aspects of their security infrastructure.
The Cisco Security Cloud leverages the generative AI Policy Assistant to simplify policy management within the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, allowing administrators to reason with existing firewall policies and streamline rule creation. This represents just one example of how generative AI can transform policy management across the Cisco Security Cloud.
Augmenting Security Analysts with Machine Speed and Scale
Threat detection and response are critical responsibilities of security operations teams, where time is of the essence and analysts must comprehend complex systems at machine scale. Cisco’s security operations center (SOC) Assistant aims to augment security analysts with the context required to make informed decisions promptly.
The SOC Assistant provides comprehensive situation analyses for analysts by correlating intelligence across the Cisco Security Cloud platform solutions. It relays potential impacts and recommends appropriate actions, significantly reducing the response time for potential threats.
