Cisco CEO Robbins To Partners: We’re Going To ‘Help You Understand How To Navigate The AI Journey’

‘At the end of the day, what we ultimately want to do is quite simple: We just want to help make AI work for you. And we want to make AI work for us. And we want to help you get there in a responsible, safe way, and one that really provides you the value that you can garner from all the data that you have in your enterprise organization,’ says Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins.

Cisco Systems is gearing up for the IT industry’s transition to AI because that transition will be anything but slow or smooth, according to Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins.

Robbins, speaking before an audience of channel partners, technology peers and customers at last week’s Cisco Live conference, said that Cisco—and the entire IT industry—needs to move faster than ever to be relevant in AI.

“I will say from Cisco’s perspective, many of you would probably tell us that when the cloud era hit we perhaps weren’t as prepared as we should have been,” he said. “I will tell you today as this AI era begins, we’re very, very prepared to help you navigate this as we go forward.”

Being prepared for AI, and doing so with haste, is key to succeeding in a time when AI is forcing everyone to make every business and people decisions faster, Robbins said.

“We’re going to have to innovate faster,” he said. “You hear some of our partners like Nvidia talking about releasing new chips every 12 months where it used to be 24 to 36 months. The pace of technology changes is picking up significantly.”

Security around AI has become another area where innovation is happening swiftly on two fronts, Robbins said.

“You need security to protect the data that you are using to do custom training, as an example, in a model that you might be running in your private enterprise,” he said. “You need to have security to make sure that you don’t have threat actors actually infiltrating those models and changing things to create different outcomes than what you shouldn’t get from your normal data. … But we also need AI for security. We know how good the bad actors have been over the last five to seven years. And with AI in their hands, they’re only going to be better.”

Cisco aims to make AI a part of its entire portfolio. Here is more about how Robbins said he will do that.

AI Forcing Faster Business, People Decisions

I think the pace that AI is moving is going to force us to make every business decision faster. We’re going to have to make people decisions faster. We’re going to have to just move faster to keep up. And we’re going to have to innovate faster. You hear some of our partners like Nvidia talking about releasing new chips every 12 months where it used to be 24 to 36 months. The pace of technology changes is picking up significantly, and we, just like you, have to move faster. [We’re talking] about Digital Experience Assurance [for cross-domain insight and proactive operations across the network], AI-native capabilities with ThousandEyes to help you ensure that all of the people that you’re serving in your organizations are having the best experience they could possibly have. And if they are not, you’ll know why. And you’ll be able to resolve it quickly. We’re going to talk about AI infrastructure and how we can deliver an integrated stack that helps you deploy AI applications with HyperFabric Unified Security Cloud management. This is something that we need so that you can have one policy deployed across all the different technologies that you consume from us in the security world.

Cisco’s $1 Billion Global AI Investment Fund

Everybody yawns when you hear about $1 billion in AI these days. We’re thinking about it slightly differently. Because what we’re doing with these companies that we’re investing in, we’re investing but we’re also defining the unique characteristics of our partnership with each of them that is going to help us help you more effectively. We’re not just investing to watch them and see, ‘Wow, what they can do, and let’s see if we can make a little return on this money.’ Part of our investment thesis is that there are unique co-development activities that we can enter into with them to bring you more innovative solutions and help you navigate the AI transition.

The Accelerating Transition To GenAI

Think about some of the technologies that we’ve talked about over the years. How long did we talk about 5G before we deployed it? We talked about these technologies for years and years and years and years. And I know, we’ve talked about AI, the first version of AI, and we’ve all been using it. But generative AI is coming on the scene very quickly. And it’s being deployed across our portfolio, and you’re probably trying to figure out use cases, if you haven’t already, and how you can use it. It’s moving at a very rapid rate. If you were around when the big cloud transition began and all the cloud hype started, I remember every CEO I knew was pressuring all of you to get to the cloud. And they had no idea why, other than everybody says we should be in the cloud, so let’s go to the cloud. ‘What’s your cloud strategy?’ I guarantee you all of you got asked this. And I heard some of you say, ‘We just deployed Office 365 so I could tell them we’re in the cloud. Leave me alone. We’re in the cloud.’ Yes, check.

I think [the transition to] AI is going to be that on steroids. Because fundamentally, my peers, and I’ve heard it from them, they’re all thinking, ‘If we don’t move quickly, my competitors might kill us. I don’t know what they might do with AI that will put us at an incredible competitive disadvantage, so we need to move fast.’

The Pressure Is On With AI For Security

I think the pressure that you all are going to face to deploy AI use cases and applications in a world that’s pretty complicated and is fraught with a lot of uncertainty is going to be really high. As we think about security, and we think about AI, and we think about Digital Experience Assurance, at the end of the day, data is the ultimate differentiator. Gaining insight from the data is going to help your users have a better digital experience. Taking all the security insight that we have, I’ll just throw a few data points out at you to tell you what Cisco is coming together to bring to you. Cisco has visibility to 1 billion endpoints from a security perspective. We see 400 billion security events per day. And Splunk ingests 4 petabytes of data into Splunk Cloud every day. We can take AI and other analytics capabilities and deliver insight to you. Because what’s happening in security today is you have to correlate five or six different events to truly understand what’s going on. One’s not going to tell you, but if you see four or five things happening at the same time, that combination might indicate that there’s a serious problem. And if you can’t take those data points and correlate them as fast as possible, then you’re going to be at a significant disadvantage from the threat actors around the world. And then, as you look at AI, it’s one of those major tech transitions that is absolutely going to benefit the incumbents because the biggest data set is going to win. Because AI is all about data.

The Pressure Is On With AI For Digital Resilience

Ultimately, we’re all striving for digital resilience. Digital resilience really has a broad meaning. It has security aspects associated with it. But it also has issues like ensuring that you’re in compliance, that you don’t have compliance issues. Digital resilience means that you’re avoiding reputational risks. You’re avoiding business-impacting outages. You’re avoiding IP theft. All of these things are aspects of digital resilience. And this is a key outcome that we’re focused on trying to help you deliver inside your organizations. And this is something that Splunk had focused on for a very, very, very long time.

Security For AI, AI For Security

We need security for AI, and we need AI for security. Let me explain those two. First of all, you need security to protect the data that you are using to do custom training, as an example, in a model that you might be running in your private enterprise. You need to have security to make sure that you don’t have threat actors actually infiltrating those models and changing things to create different outcomes than what you shouldn’t get from your normal data. You need to make sure that the questions that are being posed of these models aren’t questions that are against your culture or against what you care about. So you need security for AI. We’re going to continue to work on delivering that for you.

But we also need AI for security. We know how good the bad actors have been over the last five to seven years. And with AI in their hands, they’re only going to be better. I told our team that, from a security perspective, AI is the worst thing that’s ever happened and the best thing that’s ever happened, because [the hackers are] going to get better, and this is going to force us to leverage AI for security, because we have to be better. And it’s all going to come down to how much threat intelligence do you have? How much data do you have?

Help For Cisco’s Partners

We’re going to help our partners. We’re going to bring services to you to help you understand how to navigate the AI journey. How do you get started? How do you choose the right LLMs? How do you think about custom models? What’s the difference between some of these companies and what their capabilities are and how they can help you? ... Because at the end of the day, what we ultimately want to do is quite simple: We just want to help make AI work for you. And we want to make AI work for us. And we want to help you get there in a responsible, safe way, and one that really provides you the value that you can garner from all the data that you have in your enterprise organization. That’s all we want to do.

A Lot Of Innovation

The teams are really excited about what they’ve done. I really believe they’re operating at a pace that we haven’t in several years. So our first commitment is just to continue to deliver great innovation. Continue to drive innovation that brings greater degrees of simplicity, brings greater degree of platform capabilities to help you automate, upgrade more effectively, deal with any issues that exist in your infrastructure. We’re going to continue to drive innovation to help you be more productive. We want to continue to create and build on the trust that we’ve had for 40 years with all of you.