Cisco Systems

Cisco offers the Cisco AI Assistant for Support, a self-service tool available to Cisco customers and partners that provides automated guidance on licensing, hardware, Webex, and bug-related support issues without requiring a human support agent.

The AI Assistant for Support is accessible via Cisco's Support Case Manager portal and at a dedicated URL (supportassistant.cisco.com). It receives support case context and user queries as input and produces guided, automated responses across several knowledge domains. According to Cisco's official support page, the interaction is 'automatically launched as guided experiences' when users open specific case types. The labor impact is unclear from available sources, as Cisco does not explicitly describe whether this replaces or supplements human Cisco support engineers handling the same queries.

Cisco offers Cisco AI Defense, launched in January 2025, which uses AI to help enterprise security teams discover unauthorized AI applications in use across their organization, automatically test AI models for hundreds of safety and security vulnerabilities, and protect running AI applications from attacks like prompt injection and data leakage.

Cisco AI Defense operates at the network level, parsing DNS and cloud logs to identify both sanctioned and shadow AI applications across cloud environments. It then uses proprietary machine learning models and large language models (LLMs) to run automated 'algorithmic red teaming' — simulating hundreds of potential attacks against an enterprise's own AI models to identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited. At runtime, it applies guardrails to block adversarial inputs and prevent sensitive data from leaking through AI model outputs. Cisco describes it as 'self-optimizing, leveraging Cisco's proprietary machine learning models' fed with real-time threat intelligence from Cisco Talos. The biggest expansion of the product since its launch was announced in February 2026, extending protections to agentic AI systems.

Cisco deployed Cisco Hypershield, an AI-native security architecture that became generally available in August 2024, which autonomously analyzes network behavior, prioritizes threats, applies compensating controls to block newly discovered vulnerabilities within minutes, and continuously updates its own security policies without requiring manual patching.

Hypershield is built on open-source eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology and is deployed as software embedded in virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, servers, and network switches. It takes as input live network traffic telemetry and behavioral data from across an organization's environment, including threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, and produces outputs including prioritized threat scores, autonomous network segmentation policies, compensating controls to block exploits, and self-qualified software updates. Cisco describes this as 'AI-native' from the ground up, designed so the AI 'analyzes all potential threats across your environment and prioritizes them.' The system allows administrators to configure the level of autonomy they are comfortable with.