Cisco has revealed its next-generation generative AI-powered solutions aimed at enhancing workforce efficiency and streamlining operations for organizations by incorporating LLMs into its Collaboration and Security offerings.
Cisco's 2023 State of Global Innovation Study highlights that IT professionals consider generative AI as the technology with the greatest potential impact on their businesses. A remarkable 85% of these professionals express readiness for the forthcoming influence of generative AI.
"Generative AI will quickly become pervasive as we see businesses and workers embrace the technology to become materially more productive. At Cisco, we've been using AI for years. Now we're unveiling how we're incorporating generative AI into our existing products, helping customers drive real value to unlock the most secure, unrivaled work experiences possible," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Security and Collaboration, Cisco.
New Summarization Capabilities in Webex by Cisco
In the Webex Suite, Cisco has introduced new summarization capabilities to meet the needs of employees and customers in a hybrid work environment, as they are designed to catch up and understand relevant information quickly.
The feature called "Catch Me Up" will enable users to swiftly catch up on any missed interactions, such as meetings, calls, chats, and other relevant activities.
Intelligent meeting summaries allow users to generate crucial elements of a meeting automatically. These summaries extract key points and capture action items, along with their respective owners. This is particularly beneficial for attendees and individuals who couldn't attend the meeting, as it eliminates the need to listen to recordings or read through transcripts.
Vidcast, Cisco's video messaging tool, will be able to generate summaries, which include highlights and chapters, allowing viewers to navigate to the most significant sections of the video easily.
Moreover, the newly introduced conversation summaries provide agents with an efficient and automated method to process lengthy text exchanges from digital chats with customers, streamlining the post-call wrap-up process while also facilitating issue resolution. For instance, when a customer is transferred to a human agent for a call, they expect the agent to be well informed. By providing clear summaries of previous interactions and a comprehensive overview of the call's key points, chat summaries help agents deliver seamless customer experience.
Conversational security
Cisco is making significant investments in advanced AI and machine learning technologies to simplify the tasks of security staff and augment their capabilities. As part of its Security Cloud vision, Cisco provides a preview of new generative AI capabilities that will streamline policy management and enhance threat response.
The Cisco Security Cloud will utilize a generative AI Policy Assistant to manage cybersecurity and deal with potential attackers. It will empower security and IT administrators to define detailed security policies and assess the most effective ways to implement them across various aspects of their security infrastructure.
During this week's preview, the Cisco Policy Assistant demonstrated its ability to analyze and streamline firewall policies within the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. By leveraging generative AI, it can reason with the existing policy set and simplify rule implementation.
Augmented Analysts
In the realm of security operations, threat detection and response pose complex and critical responsibilities. Analysts are under pressure to quickly comprehend intricate systems on a large scale, as time plays a crucial role in this process.
Cisco's security operations center (SOC) Assistant aims to enhance the capabilities of security analysts by providing contextual information that aids in making timely and informed decisions. This assistant will offer comprehensive situation analysis to analysts by correlating intelligence gathered from various solutions within the Cisco Security Cloud platform. It will relay potential impacts and recommend appropriate actions, significantly reducing the response time for SOC teams when dealing with potential threats.
Webex summarization, policy management, and SOC Assistant Summaries will be available by the end of the year 2023. Additional features for SOC Assistant will be rolled out in the first half of the year 2024.
These generative AI-powered solutions add to the previously presented collaboration devices for hybrid work experiences designed for Microsoft Teams at the beginning of the year.
