Cisco Will Use AI to Keep AI Systems Safe From Attack

This is classic Cisco, right? You want to do more on services and software, but just explain the technology. You’re going to use AI as the defense tool against an attack on AI infrastructure. Well, Ed, you know security is actually one of the most pressing issues of our time and AI is actually being weaponized quite a bit by malicious actors. So it only makes sense for us to also use AI effectively to provide machine scale defences to organizations. So we launched what I would call probably one of the most consequential innovations in the history of Cisco in in the area of cybersecurity in the past 40 years. And it’s called Cisco Hyper Shield. And our our goal over there is to fundamentally reimagine security for this AI world web at AI scale because it’s it’s it’s it’s very hard to go out and handle these threats at human scale. Gigi, it’s been interesting because time and time again people have come on saying, look with AI as the aggressor, we can also use AI as the protector. You really talk about this being a radically new approach. How is it radical, How is it that new from what’s already on the market? Yeah, I think there’s it’s it’s important because you need to make sure that there’s a certain set of building blocks that are built on top of which you can build these solutions. And we now have some very advanced technologies around hardware acceleration, around AI that can allow us to build these very sophisticated capabilities. There’s many examples. I’ll give you one particular one. The amount of time that it takes from when a vulnerability is announced in the market to when an exploit happens by malicious actors is now down to single digit days. And I think I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes down to hours or minutes in the next few in in the near future. And So what we’ve done is we’ve actually seen that the, the amount of time it takes to patch that infrastructure is actually still 22 to 45 days. So you’ve got this massive gap from when an exploit happens and how long it takes to patch the infrastructure. We’ve solved that problem because what we can do now is within minutes have a shield that can put in front of infrastructure that has not been updated, that has not been patched, so that you can protect the organization from critical infrastructure attacks that might happen to hospitals or financial services organisations and so on. TT you talked about the building blocks, What we’re talking about is data centres, rows and rows of service stacks and we know that that infrastructure build out is happening, it’s happened and the spend is committed for more of it. Is the spend committed to hyper shield? Is anyone actually buying this service from you in parallel with that infrastructure build out? Well, this, this was the first day that we announced it to our customers. We had about, we had many of the leading you know, Chief Information Security officers over here in the UK where we announced this, this product. And the most common phrase that I heard was this is completely game changing and in fact one of the customers told me I’d like to have two. And so I I think if you care about cybersecurity and if you care about your critical infrastructure being protected, it’s going to be very obvious for you to make sure that you can allocate some focus on something like Cisco Hyper Shield. And the reality is, is this is the only one in the market, there’s no one else who quite handles the problem the way that we are over here. Of course all of this is surrounding the partnership and increasing partnership that you’ve been talking through with NVIDIA, our Integra’s, Nvidia’s practice been within this. And the way that we think about this is you have to work with the ecosystem at large rather than being completely kind of a walled garden. So NVIDIA is a very important player in AI and we want to make sure that we partner with them so that we can build security specific models. We actually take our technology and optimise it for their GPUs. And so we will continue to work with NVIDIA and others and NVIDIA we’ve enjoyed a great partnership with them already and this, this one just extends that further. Do you do what NVIDIA offers is expensive and everyone’s been talking about the rush to harness chips, to harness energy, the expense that’s coming with this new world of generative AI. How expensive, what can you price point your new AI cybersecurity prevention app. So the way that we’re going to go out and price this is by workload. We haven’t announced the exact pricing yet. This is going to be general availability at around the August time frame. And so between now and August, we will make sure that we actually have more information on pricing. But our our philosophy is to price for mass market, right? And we want to make sure that we have high unit volume so that we can get to many, many customers within a very quick amount of time. GC, there is a human safety net element of this. You’re not handing over complete control to the defense of critical infrastructure. Just explain the safety net. The way I think about this is humans are always apprehensive of something automated taking over. And so remember the days that when you actually had to update your iPhone and you would actually back it up three times before you started updating it. Now you don’t worry about it because there’s that trust that gets built over time. And So what we’ve done is we’ve actually made sure that customers have the option of having a human in the loop. So if you do want to auto update your systems that you actually have the ability to make sure that that can be approved by you and it doesn’t happen automatically. But when you feel comfortable you have the option of having that be completely transparent to you so that you can then start focusing on higher order bid items due to you’ve used the word customers a lot, we just have 30 seconds. But just explain who the the market is here, the users you’re selling to. Our market is every large organization, mid size organization and small organization that’s interested in making sure that they can protect the data centres from from a tax from a cybersecurity standpoint at AI scale.