Summary
- Cisco’s AI Assistant now features advanced agentic skills that automate everyday IT tasks and offer proactive network management capabilities
- The new agentic features revolutionize network operations by incorporating AI directly into the Meraki dashboard at no extra licensing cost
- AgenticOps is Cisco’s vision for AI-driven network management, reducing complexity and time spent on manual configurations
- IT teams can now access single-pane network overviews and carry out complex tasks through natural language interactions
- Cisco’s AI Assistant is built on a foundation of security and privacy, using an unrivaled breadth of network data for superior insights
Cisco AI Assistant Revolutionizes Network Management with Agentic Skills
Network management just got a lot more intelligent. Cisco has officially introduced new agentic skills for its AI Assistant, which are now available in the Meraki dashboard for all customers. These capabilities represent a significant milestone in Cisco’s AgenticOps journey, fundamentally altering how IT teams interact with and manage network infrastructure.
With the addition of agentic skills, the Cisco AI Assistant has evolved from a useful gadget to an active player in network operations. Instead of just answering questions, the AI Assistant can now take the initiative to assess network conditions, suggest improvements, and even carry out complicated tasks with little human involvement. This development signifies a basic change in how networks can be operated, transitioning from reactive problem-solving to predictive improvement.
The AI Assistant from Cisco integrates these features directly into the existing workflows in the Meraki dashboard, making advanced AI-powered network management available without disrupting established processes or requiring extensive training. By using these new agentic skills, IT teams can significantly reduce the time spent on routine configuration tasks and concentrate on strategic initiatives that add value to the business.
What Sets Cisco’s AI Assistant Apart from Other Enterprise AI Tools
There are many AI assistants on the market, but Cisco’s offering is unique due to its deep integration with network infrastructure and unmatched access to networking data. Cisco’s AI Assistant is not a general-purpose AI tool that has been adapted for IT use. Instead, it was specifically designed for network operations and has a specialized understanding of networking protocols, configurations, and troubleshooting workflows.
Using Cisco’s decades of networking experience and large datasets covering devices, applications, security systems, and internet traffic patterns, the AI Assistant can make recommendations. These suggestions are not only technically correct, but they are also contextually suitable for each organization’s unique network topology and business needs.
Unrivalled Breadth and Scale: The Power of Data
As a global leader in networking, Cisco’s AI Assistant has the advantage of an exceptional amount of data. It uses insights from millions of network devices, security threats, and performance metrics from Cisco’s customers. This immense data foundation allows for better predictions, better anomaly detection, and more relevant recommendations than AI systems with limited datasets. The system gets better the more network interactions it processes, creating a cycle of ever-improving intelligence.
Security and Privacy at the Core
When Cisco’s AI Assistant was designed, security and privacy were not just added on at the end, but were fundamental to its creation. The AI Assistant works within Cisco’s secure framework, providing strong data protection and privacy controls that meet enterprise needs. It protects customer data with encryption, access controls, and strict governance policies. All development is guided by Cisco’s responsible AI framework, which ensures that the system operates ethically and transparently, and avoids common AI issues such as hallucination or inappropriate recommendations.
“The Cisco AI Assistant is designed to simplify your daily workload and help you manage networks with speed and efficiency, so you can spend less time digging through data and more time on strategic initiatives that drive your business forward.”
Integration Across Cisco’s Ecosystem
Unlike standalone AI tools that require complex integrations, Cisco’s AI Assistant works seamlessly across the company’s product portfolio. The assistant is already integrated with ThousandEyes and Meraki, with more platform integrations planned. This ecosystem approach means the AI can provide holistic insights spanning network infrastructure, security posture, application performance, and collaboration tools. For organizations with significant Cisco investments, this integration delivers immediate value without requiring additional connector development or middleware solutions.
5 Revolutionary Agentic Skills Now Available
Cisco’s AI Assistant now includes a range of agentic skills that revolutionize the way IT teams manage networks. These skills extend beyond basic chatbot functions to provide proactive network management that predicts needs and automates complex workflows. Each skill works together with the others to create a complete network management solution that tackles the most frequent challenges faced by IT professionals.
These agentic skills mark a new era in how humans and machines interact within network operations. IT staff no longer need to use complex command syntax or sift through multiple dashboard screens. They can simply express their needs in everyday language and the AI Assistant takes care of the technical details.
1. Comprehensive Network Overview in One Place
The Cisco AI Assistant’s greatest strength is its ability to pull together network data from various sources and present it in a clear, easy-to-understand overview. This feature saves you from having to switch between different dashboards and reports to get basic network status information. With just a simple command, you can get a complete summary of the health of your entire network, including the status of your devices, connectivity metrics, security alerts, and application performance data.
This AI Assistant is smart enough to filter information and highlight the most important aspects. It brings potential problems to the forefront and provides context about their severity and potential impact. This prioritization ensures that critical problems aren’t buried under less important notifications, helping IT teams focus their attention where it’s most needed.
2. Automated Wireless Network Setup
Wireless network management usually involves a lot of repetitive tasks that can take a lot of time and can be prone to errors if done manually. The AI Assistant now allows IT staff to set up, modify, and deploy wireless networks through conversational requests. An administrator can simply tell the assistant to “Create a new guest wireless network with WPA3 encryption and a 24-hour password rotation,” and the AI will automatically handle all the technical setup steps.
This feature goes beyond simple SSID creation, encompassing more advanced wireless management tasks like bandwidth allocation, access control implementation, and scheduling network availability. The assistant can even suggest the best settings based on the specific usage patterns it sees in your environment, ensuring that new wireless networks are set up according to best practices.
3. Smart Problem-Solving
When your network starts acting up, the AI Assistant is there to help you figure out what’s going wrong. It can look at patterns across different devices, applications, and time periods to find the root cause of the problem, even if it’s something that a human operator might not see right away. But the assistant doesn’t just tell you what’s going wrong; it tells you why it’s happening and gives you specific steps you can take to fix it, based on the way your network is set up.
The AI is capable of troubleshooting across the entire network stack, from physical connectivity issues to application performance problems. It can connect seemingly unrelated events to reveal underlying patterns and provide a holistic view of network health. For example, it may notice that periodic latency spikes correspond with backup operations and suggest rescheduling those tasks to reduce business impact.
- Automated root cause analysis for common network issues
- Contextual recommendations based on your specific network topology
- Historical pattern recognition to identify recurring issues
- Step-by-step guided troubleshooting workflows
- Proactive identification of potential issues before they affect users
4. Real-Time Network Insights
The AI Assistant continuously monitors network telemetry to provide real-time insights that would be difficult for human operators to derive from raw data alone. These insights go beyond simple status monitoring to include trend analysis, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics. The system can alert administrators to subtle changes in network behavior that might indicate emerging problems, allowing for proactive intervention before users are affected.
The key to these insights is how they’re delivered. Instead of bombarding operators with technical specifics, the AI Assistant converts intricate network data into straightforward, actionable intelligence. A warning about rising retransmission rates might be displayed as “Your video conferencing quality may degrade in the next 30 minutes due to increasing congestion on the WAN link” – providing both the issue and its potential impact in business language.
5. Assisted Configuration Guidance
With the AI Assistant’s assisted configuration feature, even the most intricate network configurations that once needed a high level of technical know-how are now achievable. The assistant provides a step-by-step guide for administrators to perform complex tasks, explaining choices in simple terms and providing suggestions based on proven best practices. This makes advanced networking functions more accessible, enabling staff with less experience to execute configurations that would have previously required specialist expertise.
By validating each step before implementation and checking for potential conflicts or security implications, the guided approach significantly reduces configuration errors. When making changes, the assistant can explain the anticipated impact on the network, helping administrators understand the consequences of their actions before committing to them. This combination of guidance and validation creates a powerful learning environment where IT staff can safely expand their capabilities while ensuring network reliability.
AgenticOps: A New Era in Network Operations
Cisco’s roadmap for the future of network management is based on the idea of AgenticOps – a significant shift in how networks are planned, rolled out, and managed. AgenticOps symbolizes the merging of AI, automation, and human skills to create network operations that are more reactive, effective, and in line with business goals. The AI Assistant’s agentic abilities are the foundation of this method, allowing networks to progressively manage themselves while giving human operators full visibility and control.
What Makes AgenticOps Different from the Old Way of Managing Networks
AgenticOps is a game changer in the way we manage networks. Instead of always being on the defensive and constantly having to fix problems, we can now be proactive. The old way of doing things required people to constantly watch over the network and manually intervene when something went wrong. This meant that IT staff were always putting out fires instead of innovating. AgenticOps changes all of this by using AI to create agents that can watch over the network, analyze what’s happening, and take action on their own. They only need to involve a human when it’s absolutely necessary.
This method allows IT teams to do much more than before. No longer is each staff member restricted to only what they can personally monitor and manage. They now supervise a team of AI agents that help them manage the whole network. The system does basic tasks and troubleshooting automatically, freeing up IT professionals to work on strategic initiatives and complicated problems that need human creativity and judgment.
How AI Influences Decision-Making
When it comes to network operations, Cisco has found a sweet spot between automation and human control in their use of AI. The AI Assistant doesn’t take over for humans, but instead, it boosts human decision-making by offering a more in-depth context, highlighting pertinent information, and taking care of everyday implementation tasks. This combination of human skill and AI abilities results in outcomes that neither could achieve on their own.
The AI models that make these features possible have been trained on huge datasets of network configurations, operational patterns, and troubleshooting scenarios. This training allows the system to identify patterns that would go unnoticed by human operators and to suggest strategies that have been successful in similar situations across Cisco’s customer base. As the system continues to learn from interactions, its suggestions become increasingly sophisticated and customized to each organization’s unique environment. For more insights, you might explore whether China is about to win the AI race.
Real-World Advantages for IT Departments
By adding agentic skills to Cisco’s AI Assistant, IT departments are given real-world advantages that help them overcome the challenges they face every day. These advantages do more than just make things more efficient. They change the way networks are managed and the way IT departments function at their core.
Save Time with Automation
One of the most noticeable benefits is the significant decrease in time needed for regular network management tasks. Operations that used to take hours of manual configuration can now be done in minutes by simply asking the AI Assistant. This automation goes beyond just simple tasks and includes complex workflows that involve multiple systems and configuration areas. To explore more about these advancements, visit the Cisco AI Assistant page.
Let’s take the example of setting up a new branch office. This process would usually require days of effort from teams across network, security, and application. But now, it can be majorly automated through the AI Assistant. This system is able to understand the interdependencies between different components and can manage the entire process while keeping human operators updated about the progress and any decisions that require their input.
The time saved can be used to make the business more flexible. IT can adapt more quickly to changing needs, introduce new services more quickly, and expand operations without a corresponding increase in staff.
Improved Network Oversight
Our AI Assistant takes raw network data and turns it into actionable insights, giving a level of visibility into network operations that has never been seen before. Rather than focusing on individual metrics like traditional monitoring tools, the assistant correlates information across multiple dimensions to give a complete picture of network health and performance. This contextual understanding allows for a more accurate diagnosis of issues and a better prediction of potential problems.
Not only does this assistant provide more insight, but it also helps to show the business impact of network operations. It can take technical metrics and put them into business terms. This helps IT teams to talk to business stakeholders about the quality of service, how resources are used, and any potential risks. When technical operations and business goals are aligned, IT resources can be used in the areas that give the most value to the organization.
Making Daily Operations Less Complicated
Today’s networks are more complex than ever before, with many layers of virtualization, software-defined components, and cloud services all interacting with traditional infrastructure. This can be too much for IT teams to handle effectively using conventional tools and methods. The AI Assistant makes this complexity manageable by providing a natural language interface that hides technical details while still allowing for precise control of network resources.
The assistant takes care of the details of implementation on its own, which takes a lot of the pressure off of network operators and also decreases the chances of there being any configuration errors. This makes it easier for IT staff to use advanced network capabilities, which means that operations don’t have to rely so much on specialized expertise. This makes operations more resilient and able to function well even if key personnel aren’t available.
Turning Excessive Data into Useful Information
Modern IT teams are overwhelmed with data but lack useful insights. The amount of alerts, logs, and metrics that modern networks produce is too much for humans to handle, which can lead to alert exhaustion and missed signals. Cisco’s AI Assistant solves this problem by filtering and prioritizing information based on its relevance and potential impact.
Not only does the assistant identify issues, but it also explains why these issues are important and suggests particular measures to resolve them. By converting raw data into actionable insights, IT teams can concentrate on problems that genuinely need human intervention, while routine tasks are taken care of automatically. This leads to a more efficient use of human skills and a quicker resolution of issues that impact the business, as seen in the innovations by robotics startups backed by Nvidia and Amazon.
How to Begin Using the Cisco AI Assistant
For existing Meraki customers, it’s easy to start using the Cisco AI Assistant and its new agentic skills. The features are built directly into the Meraki dashboard, so you don’t need to deploy any additional hardware or software. This smooth integration allows your organization to start reaping the benefits right away, without having to change your operational processes.
How to Use the AI Assistant in Meraki Dashboard
You can find the AI Assistant in the Meraki dashboard interface by clicking on its icon. It’s designed to be a chat interface, so you can ask it questions or give it commands just like you would with a human. The AI Assistant will respond with the information you need, recommendations, or confirmations of actions it’s taken. The goal is to make the interaction feel like a natural conversation.
The assistant’s capabilities are managed through the same role-based permissions system as other Meraki dashboard functions. This makes sure that users can only perform actions that are appropriate for their role and responsibility level. It maintains the right governance and security controls while still providing the benefits of AI-powered automation.
Where to Begin
When you first start to use the AI Assistant, it’s a good idea to begin with tasks that involve gathering information. This will help you get used to the way the assistant works without having to make any changes to your production environment. For example, you could ask for a summary of the health of your network, a report on your device inventory, or an explanation of recent changes to your configuration. These tasks will show you how the assistant can bring together information from a range of different sources and present it in a way that is easy to understand.
After getting the hang of simple interactions, you can move on to more difficult tasks such as fixing connection problems, improving wireless coverage, or making new network sections. The step-by-step nature of these interactions makes them easy to do even for less experienced team members, and the assistant’s explanations of what it’s doing offer great chances to learn and improve team skills over time. For more insights on related topics, you might find this article on Cisco’s latest updates interesting.
What’s Coming Next: The Future Roadmap
Cisco’s investment in AI and AgenticOps is a long-term strategic direction, not a one-time product launch. The company has an ambitious roadmap to expand the AI Assistant’s capabilities across more products and use cases. They plan regular updates to introduce new skills and improve existing functionality. This continuous evolution ensures customers will continue to see returns on their investment as the system becomes more powerful and versatile.
Enhancing Independent Skills
Upcoming upgrades to the AI Assistant will enhance its independent skills to handle more intricate network operations and deeper incorporation with business processes. The planned improvements include predictive capacity planning, automated compliance verification, and proactive security posture management. These skills will further lessen the operational load on IT teams while enhancing service quality and business alignment. As the system’s comprehension of network patterns improves, it will be more and more capable of predicting needs and taking suitable actions before problems become noticeable to users or operators. For more insights, read about the potential impact of AI developments.
Collaboration with Microsoft Teams and Other Platforms
Cisco has declared its intention to expand the AI Assistant’s functionality to not only dedicated dashboard interfaces but also collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams. This will enable network operators to engage with the assistant via familiar communication channels, incorporating network intelligence straight into their workflows. The assistant will be capable of contributing to team discussions about network problems, supplying pertinent information during planning meetings, and carrying out tasks requested through collaboration tools.
These integrations will remove barriers between network operations and other business functions, creating more unified workflows that go beyond traditional organizational boundaries. Cisco’s goal is to change how organizations plan and implement technology initiatives by making network intelligence available in the contexts where decisions are made.
Common Questions
Like any major tech breakthrough, the addition of agentic skills to Cisco’s AI Assistant has sparked a lot of questions from clients and industry watchers. Below, we tackle the most frequent questions about this tech and what it means for network operations.
Can all Meraki customers use the Cisco AI Assistant?
Absolutely, the Cisco AI Assistant and its new agentic skills can now be accessed by all Meraki customers via the standard dashboard interface. There are no specific hardware requirements or platform limitations that would prevent access to this feature. This broad availability demonstrates Cisco’s dedication to making advanced network management capabilities universally accessible and ensuring that organizations of all sizes can take advantage of AI-powered operations.
Do I need to purchase extra licenses for the AI Assistant?
There’s no need to buy extra licenses to use the AI Assistant’s features. The features come as a part of the standard Meraki licensing, and there are no separate costs or subscription requirements. We’ve taken this approach to make sure that AI-powered network management is available to all customers without creating new budgetary challenges or making procurement more complex.
Although the basic AI Assistant features come with the standard license, there may be different licensing requirements for some of the more advanced features or for integrations with non-Meraki products. Cisco’s documentation provides comprehensive details about any such exceptions, so you can clearly see what features are available under different licensing models.
By structuring the licensing model in this way, Cisco hopes to encourage adoption and deliver maximum value to customers. By including these capabilities in existing licenses, rather than creating new paid tiers, the company ensures that organizations can start seeing benefits right away without having to navigate through complex procurement processes. For more insights on Cisco’s strategic moves, check out their latest earnings report.
What measures does Cisco take to protect data privacy and security with its AI Assistant?
Cisco has put in place strong safeguards to secure customer data that the AI Assistant uses. The system functions within Cisco’s security framework, featuring data encryption during transit and when idle, stringent access controls, and thorough audit logging. Customer network data is never used to train AI models for other customers, providing total separation between the environments of different organizations. Cisco’s method of AI development is directed by its Responsible AI framework, which puts a premium on privacy, security, fairness, and transparency in all AI applications.
Is the AI Assistant compatible with non-Cisco network devices?
The AI Assistant is best suited to Cisco’s own networking products due to the depth of integration and the wealth of data available from these systems. However, the assistant can also be useful in mixed environments due to its knowledge of standard networking protocols and its ability to integrate with multi-vendor management platforms. Cisco is working on improving the assistant’s capabilities for heterogeneous environments, understanding that most organizations have networks that include equipment from multiple vendors.
What preparation do I need to start using the Cisco AI Assistant?
One of the great things about the AI Assistant is that it’s built to understand everyday language, which means you don’t need any special training to start using it. If you have a basic understanding of networking, you can start chatting with the system straight away, asking it questions and giving it instructions in plain English. The assistant talks back to you, explaining what it’s doing and why, so you can learn as you go.
Companies looking to speed up integration can find a wealth of online resources from Cisco, including instructional videos, example use cases, and guides to best practices. These resources can help teams fully grasp the range of capabilities on offer and find the most effective ways to incorporate the assistant into their day-to-day operations. Many users have found that a short introductory session is all it takes to get started, with more in-depth knowledge developing naturally as they use the system on a regular basis.
The Cisco AI Assistant is a major advancement in network management technology, and it fulfills the promise of AI-powered operations that are more efficient, insightful, and business-aligned. Cisco has integrated powerful agentic skills directly into the familiar Meraki dashboard, making advanced AI capabilities accessible to organizations of all sizes without requiring disruptive operational process changes or additional specialized infrastructure investment.