Cisco AI Canvas: Agentic AI for Network Operations & Troubleshooting

The Era of Agentic AI

• 🚀 CiscoLive highlighted the next era of AI, moving from intelligent chatbots to autonomous agents that perform tasks on behalf of humans.
• 💡 This shift to an Agentic AI world necessitates new infrastructure assumptions, addressing constraints in compute, power, network bandwidth, and emphasizing safety and security.

Cisco's Strategic AI Focus

• ✅ Cisco will focus on delivering infrastructure and an end-to-end safety and security platform for AI-ready data centers.
• 🏠 The company aims to future-proof workplaces for humans across various environments, from offices to home and factory floors.
• 🛡️ A key area is building safe, secure, and digitally resilient infrastructure that can detect, investigate, and remediate issues.

Introducing AI Canvas for AgenticOps

• 🧠 Cisco introduced AI Canvas, a generative user interface designed for AgenticOps, enabling agents and humans to collaborate on problem-solving.
• 💬 Users can interact with the AI assistant using natural language to fetch data and initiate troubleshooting.

AI-Powered Network Troubleshooting

• 🛠️ During a live demo, AI Canvas demonstrated troubleshooting a network outage by pulling data from ServiceNow, Meraki, Thousand Eyes, and Splunk.
• 📊 The platform's Deep Network Model analyzes tickets, generates dynamic UI widgets and path visualizations, and suggests remediation actions.
• 🤝 It supports collaborative troubleshooting, allowing users to invite team members and automatically generate summaries of actions taken.

Agentic Operations and Human Oversight

• 🔄 AI Canvas enables AgenticOps to take actions, such as applying a Quality of Service (QoS) policy to devices automatically.
• 👤 A crucial feature is the "human in the loop" mechanism, allowing users to revert changes and maintain control over automated actions.
• 📈 The system provides live refresh data to monitor the impact of changes and can automatically generate reports of the entire troubleshooting process.

Availability and Impact

• 🗓️ The AI Canvas solution is expected to be available to customers by October of this year.
• 🌐 The Deep Network Model will be accessible to all CCIE users via the Cisco portal by the end of the current month.