Cisco-owned ThousandEyes launches AI to predict and fix internet outages, teases ChatGPT-style tech

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Cisco's ThousandEyes internet monitoring unit on Monday unveiled new artificial intelligence-powered capabilities it said will allow for much faster prediction and diagnosis of internet outages and disruptions.

The company said its new AI tech, called Digital Experience Assurance, or DXA, would enable customers of Cisco's networking technology to introduce the ability to automatically act on issues in their network quality.

This is opposed to what is currently the case with ThousandEyes' software, where customers mostly only monitor their IT infrastructure for network issues.

'Google Maps of the internet'

Cisco ThousandEyes terms itself the "Google Maps" of the internet. That's because it has a broad, end-to-end view of every user and any application over any network.

Founded 15 years ago, the company says it's been investing lots into AI in the past several years.

But now, ThousandEyes is making big, AI-focused changes to its platform aimed at giving its client base even more visibility over network quality and resilience.

Joe Vaccaro, vice president and general manager of ThousandEyes, said DXA would provide the ability "not only to resolve issues before they begin to impact my users, but leverage broad data to actually begin to predict and give forward intelligence on what might happen across infrastructure, to proactively address it before it begins to significantly degrade overall digital experiences."

"Digital experience assurance helps to build upon this evolutionary journey beyond metrics, beyond monitoring, towards a platform that delivers on a closed loop system," Vaccaro told CNBC in an exclusive interview ahead of the Monday Cisco Live event in Las Vegas.

Among the other capabilities, DXA comes with are the ability for businesses to correlate, analyze, diagnose, predict, optimize, and remediate with little or no manual intervention.

Cisco ThousandEyes says its platform is powered by over 650 billion daily measurements collected from around the globe. The firm committed to giving businesses visibility into their internal environments, including on-premises networks and cloud environments.

The product builds on Cisco ThousandEyes' Event Detection tech, which the company says already reduces the time taken to detect a disruption event to mere minutes and less staffing, rather than hours and multiple engineers.

AI-generated internet status reports

Vaccaro also teased the development of a new product at Cisco ThousandEyes that, once complete, would enable users to generate AI-create scripts showing the status of global ISP (internet service provider), public cloud, and edge service networks, or an application's connection a network.

This is similar to what ThousandEyes currently offers for internet monitoring, but with AI automatically doing the work rather than people.

"That is in development and should be seeing the light of day here in the very, very near future," Vaccaro told CNBC.

The product would incorporate large language models, which are considered the bedrock of generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Racking up 100 million users to date, ChatGPT was catapulted into global virality just months after its creator OpenAI released it. The app's success stoked massive hype around artificial intelligence, with companies of all stripes making developments of their own in the space.