With the potential to add $4.4 trillion to annual global GDP, the race to harness the power of GenAI is well and truly on. As the curtains fell on this year’s Cisco Live in Amsterdam, it was clear to me that what we announced has a potential transformative impact.
To move beyond the hype cycle, organisations are grappling with the challenge of defining a GenAI strategy that enables both quick and responsible deployment. In Amsterdam, we showcased our commitment to AI innovations with the unveiling of partnerships and solutions to help businesses carefully navigate this step-change in their technology journey.
Navigating the revolution
Our recent AI Readiness Index surveyed 8,000 business and IT leaders across 30 countries, revealing that while 95% of businesses have an AI strategy in development, only 14% are poised to integrate it into their operations.
This chasm underscores a pivotal industry challenge: simplifying complex AI infrastructure to transition towards mainstream operation. GenAI workloads place unprecedented demands on network, storage, and compute power – networks must handle masses of data in motion to fuel model training and tuning, and storage needs to scale effortlessly to match speed and volume.
Now enterprises have to avoid creating complex isolated islands of operations and focus on bringing GenAI workloads into the mainstream. To realise this necessary shift, Cisco announced our collaboration with NVIDIA, pioneers of the GPUs fuelling the AI boom. This partnership will do more than just bring robust AI infrastructure to the marketplace, it paves the way for more solutions that are secure, manageable, and scalable to the end-to-end needs of advanced GenAI workloads.
Enhancing productivity and insights
But of course, GenAI’s practical needs and application extend beyond silicon. For instance, GenAI now enhances Cisco Webex meetings with real-time transcription, translation, and actionable summary generation, one example of how the technology saves time in everyday business operations. Moreover, natural language processing in the Cisco Observability Platform simplifies troubleshooting, empowering customers with better data visibility, insights, and actions.
The pace of change, high stakes and opportunities means central IT and security teams are seeking ways to rapidly deliver trustworthy GenAI capabilities with control over sensitive data, security, and cost. It’s metrics like those delivered by Cisco Motific, our first SaaS product that enable organisations to confidently embrace AI while upholding the highest data protection standards. With the added ROI tracking component, these tools help to ensure enduring benefits for businesses throughout the entire GenAI journey.
Continuous improvement
How GenAI reshapes businesses across all industries will only continue to accelerate. The opportunity to power progress has seldom been more palpable. Enterprises will need to constantly rethink and rearchitect their infrastructures. In doing so, they’re looking for smart solutions, tools, and partners to continue building on this momentum and drive sustainable and ethical innovation to succeed in the GenAI era.
We are committed to developing solutions that not only address today’s challenges but also anticipate tomorrow’s opportunities, ensuring our customers can navigate the evolving GenAI landscape with confidence and agility. By fostering a culture of continuous innovation, we aim to empower industries to not only adapt to the GenAI revolution but to thrive in it, harnessing its full potential to unlock new levels of efficiency, creativity, and growth.
Cisco is in a unique position to drive this new era of AI, with the infrastructure to power it, unmatched breadth and scale of data to feed it, and a portfolio optimised to secure it. Add to that our acquisition of Splunk, there will be even more to come.
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