Interest in AI has exploded over the last two or three years, but enterprises are only just beginning to think about how they’re going to take advantage of it, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told the audience at the company’s recent AI Summit.
Robbins said Cisco is seeing some enterprise customers begin to build applications in the healthcare industry and manufacturing world. “We’re taking in data off of sensors all over the manufacturing floor, camera feeds allowing them to make real-time adjustments in the manufacturing process without human intervention,” Robbins said.
He referenced a recent Cisco AI Readiness survey that found only 13% of its enterprise customers feel fully ready to capture AI’s potential, but some 90% feel pressure to make sure they are out in front of AI development.
There is an understanding about the risks of AI in the C-suite, “but that is also balanced with the risk and concern for all of our customers of being left behind by some competitor figuring out [AI] faster than they do,” Robbins said.
In an interview on Yahoo Finance, Robbins doubled down on the notion that enterprises will be ramping up their use of AI, saying 2025 will be the year “we’re going to see enterprises really deploy lots of applications.”
“We were talking about contact center. Customer service is a real common application. You could contemplate the basic responsibilities of a network operations analyst being put into an agentic AI agent and actually doing that job,” Robbins said.
AI creates a massive demand for infrastructure, he said. “Not only GPUs, CPUs, LPUs, but networking infrastructure,” Robbins said. “Customers want to know how they are going to be monitoring applications, thinking about data… I think most everyone in this industry would say that sometime in the next 12 months, or 24 months, we’re going to exhaust all the publicly available information [for AI systems to learn].”
Corporate data, meanwhile, represents an opportunity for enterprises. “There’s a multiplier of that data in the private enterprise where we’ll go next to actually help our customers unleash the power of their own data in combination with this public data,” Robbins said, “and we have to get that right.”
Source:: Network World