Everything I Learned at the AI Cisco Conference

This has to be the craziest festival you've ever seen. It's got Elton John, it's got Tom Brady, it's got McLaren Racing, it's got DJs. This is wild. Oh, wait. What? These are clips from Cisco Live, an event focused on enterprise networking solutions. But let me tell you, people at Cisco know how to put on an event. Now, typically on this channel, I talk about the latest AI news as well as the consumer facing products that have AI integrated into them. However, Cisco's customers aren't really the general consumer. People like you and me who use tools like ChatGPT and Claude Midjourney and all of these cool AI consumer facing tools probably don't think too often about companies like Cisco and up until now probably haven't really been on your radar as a company that is leading innovation in the world of AI. But hopefully that changes with this video. I'm gonna do my best to break down why people like me and you, the general consumers, should actually care about what Cisco is up to and why, even if maybe you're not one of Cisco's enterprise customers, why you should actually care about these enterprise solutions that Cisco is putting out there. Now, full disclosure, Cisco did fly me out to Las Vegas and put me up on a hotel room and sponsor this video so that I can loop you in on what Cisco's been up to and why it even matters to you. For the most part, most of the tools that you're using online on a daily basis are probably powered by Cisco technology, so. So while you may not be using their tools directly, the tools that you are using are using Cisco solutions. In fact, here's a quick explanation from a couple of the executives over at Cisco about what Cisco does and why you should care.

Cisco has been around for almost 40 years and our purpose has been to really securely connect the world. Every time you pick up your phone, every time you're on your laptop, there's Cisco technology enabling that connection. About 80% of the traffic, the Internet traffic today runs on Cisco technology.

Most of the things that you will hear about in terms of consumer apps actually get built on our network. We are actually sitting within these hyperscalers, these massive training clusters, the inference clusters, and everybody's using those clusters in some shape or form to build those consumer apps.

If you just look at one rack of GPU servers and you look at the amount of bandwidth that that rack actually utilizes, there's more bandwidth in that rack than the entire North America mobile cellular infrastructure. So we partner companies like Nvidia to go and connect all of those GPUs together over network. We are the networking company.

What we do is what we've been.

Doing best for almost 40 years is connecting things, connecting people, connecting users, connecting applications. The performance and the scale is bigger than anything that's ever existed before.

We kind of power the AI application revolution.

And again, you may not have been familiar with who Cisco was and what they have been up to, but the companies that you are using are likely using Cisco's tech to deliver whatever service or offering that you're getting. In fact, some of the most recognizable companies on the planet are using Cisco's technology under the hood. And well, guess what? Now Cisco is getting into AI. They're leveraging the latest AI breakthroughs to make their systems and services better and more secure.

The way Cisco thinks about AI is in two buckets. One is AI for product, and the other one is product for AI. So AI for product is what you usually touch and feel and see and interact with. So this is AI sitting within our security, networking, observability collab portfolios to make those experiences better, to make the product better, to drive new features. And then the last bucket is product for AI, which is what we've been announcing in the past few days, which is can you build infrastructure to enable the build out of AI applications? Can you build security to secure AI itself? The entire pipeline? Can you look at data and make sure that you provide insights in the infrastructure? Because in the end, it's the same infrastructure that's being used to build all of the consumer apps that utilize AIs. When it comes to the hardware itself, the model layer, the tooling layer, the security layer, of course, observability layer, as well as building out assistants and agents that actually help our customers be productive.

If you think about our business, it's how do you make sure that you provide people connectivity with network? How do you make sure that you provide people protection? From a cybersecurity standpoint, how do you give people visibility? From an observability standpoint, how do you make sure that you have the right data architecture in place? The Personas that we cater to, the people that we cater to, are the IT administrators, whether they be networking people, security people, data architects, and they typically use very complicated systems to go set the policies in the right way. So we've built this thing called an AI assistant that sits on top of our products that allows us to make sure that AI is embedded in the fabric of the product itself.

Here's some of the Big announcements that they made during Cisco Live that I think might actually be interesting to you. They announced a partnership with Nvidia on a project called Hyper Fabric. Now, imagine a company wants to use all of the AI technology that's available to them to help improve their customer service and to create better products. Normally, they'd need to assemble all of the technical components themselves, things like computer networks and AI processors, the software, the data storage, things that most companies right now lack the AI expertise to actually build. Well, Hyper Fabric makes this really simple for the company to implement. It prepackages all of those components into a single solution and toolkit for the company. And not only that, but the toolkit actually guides these companies on implementing the technology, essentially making it easier for any company to implement the latest and greatest AI tech into the products that they sell. Now, Cisco also has a product called Thousand Eyes, which is designed to keep an eye on your entire network and tech stack and alert you when issues pop up. Well, they're now integrating AI into this Thousand Eyes platform so that it can proactively find potential problems before the problem gets much bigger. And it can spot things like whether there's bad code or a network issue or a hardware issue, which ensures that the companies that you're using online have less downtime, less security issues, less bugs, less potential for hacks and things like that. It basically uses AI now to ensure that the tools and products that you use are are safer, because Thousand Eyes is keeping watch on them. They also announced a $1 billion AI startup fund where Cisco is going to be investing in companies across the entire tech stack that are focused on AI.

We want to be the infrastructure stack that powers safe, secure, trustworthy, scalable. And so when we look at that entire stack, all the way from hardware to models to training to tooling to apps, we need to figure out where we have strengths. We need to figure out why we need to partner and collaborate. That AI fund is basically looking at those kinds of things, but we'll be looking at that stack and saying, how do we fit the gaps in that picture? And how do we build AI that is safe, accessible and trustworthy, scalable for everyone?

And just like every other company that's trying to implement AI right now, they share the same privacy and safety and security concerns that pretty much everybody shares. And they are actively working to solve a lot of these problems.

The level of qualification required to become a hacker has gone down quite dramatically. AI attacks are going to get far more sophisticated. That is an inevitability that's going to happen. And the only way to solve against that is you have to make sure that the defenses are AI native and then thought about at AI scale from the get go when you start conceiving a defense. I also feel like there's never going to be a time where the ingenuity of people is not going to be necessary in cybersecurity for AI. If you only look at the rose colored glasses view of everything optimistic and then there's collateral damage that happens, you'll just figure it out. Then I think in AI will be too late by the time it actually happens. You have to make sure that you think about responsible AI. You think about transparency, you think about fairness, you think about a bias injected into the models. Those are things that are going to be pretty important to actually keep in mind as you're building these systems. And I think tech vendors like ourselves, we will have a lot of responsibility in not just looking at what the upside of the use of this technology is, but what the downside is and accounting for the downside before we ship products out.

And while I was at this conference, there was a buzzword that I kept on hearing during almost every single presentation.

Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience.

Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience. Digital resilience is in understanding what's happening across all users, all applications, all things for that particular digital experience. And if there is an issue, what's actually causing the issue? Is it your machine? Is it your WI fi? Is it the last mile connection? Is it the service provider? Is it your cloud? What is it? We have such a great amount of visibility that we can actually go and point it out in a rapid way.

So essentially, digital resilience is making sure that your company is ready for anything that can be thrown at it, whether it be hackers or bugs in the system or poorly written code. Digital resilience, which is what Cisco is doing its best to provide for people, means that you're ready for any one of these scenarios. Your tech stack will ensure that you come out of the other side with as limited damage on your company as possible. Now, Cisco is one of the largest companies on the planet. They're within the top 100 largest companies. And when they get together with the Cisco team, the Cisco customers, and people like me who are sort of reporting on the advancements, well, they do it up big.

Enterprise at work. And what's the deal. AI Tech it feels unreal. This event feels more like a party than a conference. Just watch these drummers take their entrance. Am I dreaming of Dino? Just be so pretty.

Is that a race car or am I going crazy?

This DJ has got the crowd ready to go.

Am I dreaming?

And to wrap up, I just want to quickly thank Cisco for inviting me out, sponsoring this video and just allowing me to be a part of the city story of this event. Now, Cisco may not be the first company you think of when you think of AI, but they are doing a ton of work behind the scenes to make sure that the companies that you are using are safe and secure and private while leveraging the power of AI to do it even better than they ever could before. Thank you so much for tuning into this video. I really, really appreciate you. If you want to see more videos like this about big events in the industry, make sure you give this a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel so you don't miss them. I'll be sharing a ton more AI news, tools and tutorials on this channel, so if you're into that kind of thing, make sure you're subscribed because you're not going to want to miss what I have coming next. Thanks again. I really appreciate you. I'll see you in the next video. Bye Bye.