Cisco’s Strategy: Essential Infrastructure for the AI Future
Cisco is actively transitioning into a "hyper innovation mode", asserting its mission to become the critical infrastructure company for the AI era. The world is rapidly entering the second major phase of AI—the agentic phase—where intelligent agents will move beyond basic chat responses to execute complex tasks and jobs with near full autonomy. To facilitate this shift, Cisco is committed to solving two primary constraints: the scarcity of infrastructure and a fundamental trust deficit.
On the infrastructure front, Cisco ensures AI development is not constrained by providing the "picks and shovels" during the AI rush. This involves building next-generation switching infrastructure designed for high-performance, low-latency networking. A critical focus is on energy efficiency, ensuring that every kilowatt of power saved on the network can be redirected to powering GPUs for model training and inference. Cisco maintains partnerships with key technology providers, including Nvidia and AMD.
To establish a trust surplus, Cisco offers security solutions to combat the unpredictable nature of AI models, which can "hallucinate". Cisco developed AI Defense, a product that serves as a common security substrate across all models and agents. AI Defense implements runtime enforcement guardrails to validate model behavior and prevent attempts to "jailbreak" or deceive models. Cisco has a unique advantage: it is the only company that can fuse a world-class security stack directly into the network fabric, providing unparalleled insights into potential breaches.
This critical infrastructure mission extends profoundly into the public sector through Cisco’s partnership with Asynchronous Technology Services (ATS). ATS, founded by veterans and certified as a leading Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise (DVBE), specializes in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions and Cybersecurity. ATS assists California agencies in meeting state procurement requirements and applying cutting-edge technology to support top public service goals. ATS employs Cisco-certified IT specialists, ensuring public sector partners seamlessly integrate Cisco’s network infrastructure and AI Defense products to achieve their policy objectives with the best commercially available technology.