AI is all the rage in the tech industry today, and at Cisco, the networking administration giant, executives say they are taking a utilitarian approach.
While the company’s leaders are embracing the increased capabilities and efficiency AI may bring to the industry, they’re hesitant to read too much into predictions about the future of AI that have defined much of the conversation around the technology in recent months.
“When you think about any statement about a doomsday scenario with AI, replace AI with computer code—so if you say, ‘All computer code is going to take over,’ this doesn’t sound as menacing,” Cisco Outshift SVP Vijoy Pandey told IT Brew.
Alive and kicking. IT Brew spoke with Pandey and other Cisco C-suite leaders at Cisco Live in Las Vegas in early June to get their perspectives on the new technology and how it’s impacting the industry and changing the tech landscape.
“The way we think about AI is [that] it’s a tool that can only help you achieve your outcomes,” Pandey said.
Those outcomes include security. The technology is fast becoming integrated into Cisco firewalls, SVP and General Manager of the Cisco Security Business Group Tom Gillis said during an interview with IT Brew.
Gillis, who has been with Cisco since January, told IT Brew that there will always be a human involved in making decisions and prioritizing operational control—“the AI is an assistant,” he said.
“With AI, it’s a new way of interfacing with a system that’s going to make it meaningfully more intuitive,” Gillis said. “I always joke, if you find yourself talking to your firewall, that’s usually a really bad situation. But now, all of a sudden, your firewall is going to talk back to you.”
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Firewall capabilities. Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn sees an ongoing role of AI in security that will make it indispensable. Monotonous tasks that currently require human intelligence to sort out the signal from the noise are the future of AI, as the technology will allow for parsing information in different silos.
“At some point, the only thing that will be able to combat AI is more AI,” Previn said. “Because you’re just not going to be able to do signature-based blocking and detecting; you’re gonna have to be able to pick up the way these things are morphing and working in real time.”
AI’s role in expanding firewall security capabilities strikes Jeetu Patel, Cisco EVP and general manager of Security and Collaboration Business Units, as the wave of the future.
Citing the power of generative AI to use natural-sounding language to assist in alerting users about permissions, Patel explained that the technology will let software designers like Cisco expand the way it manages firewalls and security across the industry.
“We want to build software…that helps companies be able to take advantage of what we have because we all have a finite set of resources we have to place towards problems,” Patel said.