“We believe that we need security for AI, and we need AI for security,” Robbins said. “First of all, you need security to protect the data that you are using to do custom training, as an example, in an AI model that you might be running into private enterprise. You need to have security to make sure that you don’t have threat actors actually infiltrating those models… You need to make sure that the questions that are being posed of these models aren’t questions that are against your culture, or against what you care about. So you need security for AI, and we’re going to continue to work on delivering that.”
AI training and certification
Products aside, Cisco announced plans to bolster AI career-related initiatives. First, Cisco announced the initial stage of its AI partner specialization training that will provide business partners with the knowledge needed to optimize infrastructure for AI workloads using Cisco technology. The training will include AI basics, a taxonomy of AI solutions, and an overview of Cisco’s AI strategy, governance and use cases for Cisco platforms.
Cisco also added a new AI certification in designing AI architecture. The vendor-agnostic certification will let employers, employees and job seekers learn the skills needed to design modern AI/ML compute and networks, according to Cisco.
$1 billion AI investment fund
Cisco is launching $1 billion global AI investment fund to help bolster the startup ecosystem and expand the development of secure and reliable AI solutions. As part of the new AI fund, Cisco announced investments in Cohere, Mistral AI and Scale AI. Over the last few years, Cisco has acquired or invested in more than 20 AI-focused vendors.
As Cisco’s AI strategy unfolds, multi-product solutions and partnerships will play a role in Cisco’s success or failure, experts said.
For example, the Nexus HyperFabric AI cluster has a ton of merit for enterprises, and it is competitively differentiated from other options on the market, said Vijay Bhagavath, research vice president with IDC. “The idea that enterprise customers who want to ramp up AI don’t have to go out and buy all the components to get going will be of value.”
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