Less than a year after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public, Cisco Systems is already well into the process of embedding generative artificial intelligence (genAI) into its entire product portfolio and internal backend systems.
The plan is to use it in virtually every corner of the business, from automating network functions and monitoring security to creating new software products.
But Cisco’s CIO, Fletcher Previn, is also dealing with a scarcity of IT talent to create and tweak large language model (LLM) platforms for domain-specific AI applications. As a result, IT workers are learning as they go, while discovering new places and ways the ever-evolving technology can create value.
Previn took over as CIO at Cisco in April 2022. Prior to that, he worked at IBM for 15 years — the last four as its CIO. So, Previn is familiar the competitive landscape and he’s aware that every genAI model his company creates is low-hanging fruit for industrial espionage. At the same time, he’s concerned about securing proprietary AI technology that costs millions of dollars to create, and understands that genAI can sometimes take on a mind of its own. Keeping a human in the loop is always important.
Cisco
Fletcher Previn
Previn spoke to Computerworld about Cisco’s internal AI efforts. The following are exerpts from that interview.
How is Cisco using generative AI and what are your challenges with it? “It’s an exciting time. It’s an especially interesting time to be in IT where now 10 or 11 months after ChatGPT entered the scene, it continues to amaze and terrify in some cases.
“We think of it in…three categories of how are we going to bring AI to bear on for ourselves, for our products, and for our customers?
“In terms of how we’re using it for ourselves, there’s a lot in that. I’m about one year into the job now and spend a lot of time thinking about IT as a culture change and how we bring technology as a force multiplier to our workforce; AI helps in that way.
“If you think about networking — the core business of Cisco — you have this firehose of data and information and it’s the ability to identify things in a timely fashion, make sense of it, and take action based on it where AI excels.
“So, if you think about network monitoring, …you can use AI algorithms to analyze huge amounts of data in real time to detect anomalies, detect performance issues, or predict problems. The whole idea of predictive maintenance and using AI to detect when you’re going to have a network failure or performance problem and then take preventative maintenance to prevent it is huge; then the ability to automate routine network management tasks like configuration management, device provisioning, policy enforcement, reducing manual things in general….”
What keeps you up at night in terms of AI? “I think we want to make sure we have a human in the loop at all times. …I think part of the reason machine learning was slow…
2023-11-07 10:41:02
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