Companies are racing toward enterprise-grade AI – News

No single company can operationalize artificial intelligence alone. It takes a collaborative agentic AI ecosystem to integrate networking, observability and governance to bring enterprise-grade AI to life.

Yet most organizations are still juggling siloed tools, ad hoc pilots and mounting risk. Therefore, a deep, cross-platform integration should be designed to accelerate adoption and provide credibility for customers tackling complex AI modernizations, according to Shailesh Manjrekar (pictured, second from right), chief AI and marketing officer at Fabrix.ai.

“Agentic is all about being embedded into existing processes and workflows,” Manjrekar said. “That’s where there is already an install base with customers … which is where we are able to plug in our agentic capabilities.” 

Manjrekar was joined by Papi Menon (furthest right), vice president of product management and chief product officer of Outshift by Cisco Systems Inc., Andy Thurai, field chief technology officer of Splunk Inc., a Cisco company, and Mohannad Abuissa, managing director of solution engineering and chief technology officer for the Middle East, Africa, Turkey, Romania and the Commonwealth of Independent States at Cisco. They spoke with Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at theCUBE Research, and Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting, at the “Agentic AI Unleashed: The Future of Digital & IT Operations” event for an exclusive interview on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Fabrix.ai’s collaborative ecosystem is moving toward enterprise-grade AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Building an agentic ecosystem for the enterprise-grade AI

A major hurdle for enterprises is moving beyond consumer-grade AI tools. Deploying agentic AI at scale requires a new level of trust, compliance and security, especially when dealing with sensitive customer data and critical business processes. This is the focus of Outshift, Cisco’s incubation arm, which is fostering an “internet of agents,” according to Menon. 

“You can’t build a castle if you don’t have a solid foundation, and that’s what we are building,” Menon said. “We are building a robust foundation for the entire life cycle of a multi-agentic system.” 

The most immediate adoption of agentic AI is happening in information technology operations, where the sheer volume and velocity of data has surpassed human capacity. Cisco’s Splunk division is central to this new operating model, enabling agentic AI to be trained on machine data as well as human-generated text, Thurai noted. 

“Most of the companies were going after building the [large language models] based on a human-generated data,” Thurai said. “Nobody concentrated on creating a machine-generated data. We are building an architecture … called a Cisco Data Fabric, which essentially will allow you to catalog them into a machine data lake.”

This ecosystem strategy is already being deployed globally. According to a Cisco AI Readiness Index, 92% of organizations in the Middle East plan to deploy AI agents within the next year, Abuissa explained. For these customers pursuing enterprise-grade AI, the combined stack provides a clear path from data to autonomous action.

“Cisco provides the secure AI-ready infrastructure and observability fabric. Splunk delivers the analytics and correlation layer across the data. And the way I see [Fabrix.ai], it adds the agentic intelligence that turns those insights into autonomous remediation and optimization,” Abuissa said. “Together, the whole stack enables customers to move from visibility to action.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Agentic AI Unleashed: The Future of Digital & IT Operations” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Agentic AI Unleashed: The Future of Digital & IT Operations” event. Neither Fabrix.ai, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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