Cisco AI: What big changes can you expect for your IT infrastructure?

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Like Karl Benz redefining transportation with the internal-combustion engine, AI has completely changed the way we discuss, think about, and use modern technology.

It’s easy to see why – AI has already made huge waves personalizing e-commerce, accelerating research and development, combating financial fraud, and so much more.

It’s no surprise, then, that Cisco has invested roughly $1 billion in AI. At Cisco Live 2024, they unveiled Cisco AI, a new tool integrated throughout their portfolio to help users deploy, configure, and maintain their Cisco ecosystem. In addition to this, Cisco is collaborating with NVIDIA to deliver AI infrastructure solutions for the data center.

These investments mean big changes are on the way for your Cisco infrastructure. How will Cisco AI impact your ecosystem and how can you reap the benefits?

What can you do with Cisco AI?

Cisco AI provides insights that can help enhance your user experience, reduce downtime, and bolster security across your entire infrastructure, no matter where products are within your network. Having this kind of holistic view empowers you to simplify management without sacrificing any capabilities.

Conquer modern networking and security challenges

The challenges you face within your network and security landscapes continue to get more and more complex. It’s okay to admit you need a helping hand!

Cisco AI provides valuable insights prior to and as incidents occur, helping you respond proactively and in real time. And by predicting problems with your network, hardware, and configurations before they happen, Cisco AI gives you the insight you need to close gaps before problems arise.

Security-related use cases for Cisco AI include:

• Decreasing your mean time to resolution (MTTR) during an incident by consolidating the number of dashboards you need to review.
• Layering Cisco AI on top of Cisco XDR to increase its potency and scalability with minimal additional effort or resources.

Easily create policies and configure equipment

Cisco AI redefines their customer experience across networking, security, and collaboration domains, helping teams more easily create policies, troubleshoot hiccups, and enhance security.

Integrated across most of Cisco’s applications, Cisco AI can provide step-by-step guidance for common questions and complex configurations, saving critical time often spent conferring with peers, scouring forums, and waiting for support tickets.

Manage faster and smarter

Cisco AI cuts time spent managing your Cisco ecosystem by automating repetitive and tedious tasks, as well as by providing digestible insights into your analytics and reports.

Your Firewall Admin can, for example, ask Cisco AI to pinpoint policies in place within a specific application. It will display all applicable policies, how many devices they target, and when and by whom they were last modified.

Other management-related use cases for Cisco AI include:

• Tracking and measuring the carbon footprint of your IT, OT, and IoT devices.
• Identifying peak energy usage patterns and automating power and cooling accordingly.
• Receiving automatic updates about equipment EOL dates and overall device health.

Break down barriers to collaboration

Within Webex, Cisco AI can provide meeting notes, summarized missed messages after a long vacation, and even improve the quality of your webcam and microphone to brighten your image in dark rooms or ignore your barking dog.

And to improve meeting accessibilities for attendees who speak different languages or have difficulty hearing, Cisco AI can provide live translations, ensuring everyone can participate, learn, and act.

Using AI can be easy. Adopting AI often isn’t.

With its ability to quickly identify, set, and edit policies, rules, and configurations, Cisco AI can potentially become an essential, time-saving tool for your infrastructure, security, and admin teams.

And it’s not just for tech-savvy administrators; because Cisco AI helps you participate in and act on meetings and messages in Webex, knowledge workers across your organization stand to benefit.

But for many organizations, the biggest barrier to entry for a new tool like this is adoption. It’s easy for users to get stuck in their routines, be skeptical of new technology or methods, or assume they’re better off doing things how they’ve always done them.

As a Cisco Gold Partner, SHI has a deep understanding of how you can leverage Cisco AI to the fullest. Our dedicated adoption team works with you to implement industry-proven strategies to drive adoption across your organization, from defining ideal use cases to offering trainings, planning and coordinating your messaging, and more.

Contact us today to learn how you can benefit from and adopt Cisco AI.