The US-based Cisco Systems is eyeing to play big in a nascent AI-focussed cybersecurity market, and believes that the Indian government is deeply engaged with private players, and taking exemplary efforts in the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) domain. In an interaction with ETTelecom’s Muntazir Abbas, Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President— Security and Collaboration at Cisco Systems talks on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, telco AI adoption, Webex portfolio, and AI Codec.
India is very concerned about the use of AI, and advocates that it should be used responsibly. What do you suggest from an industry standpoint?
From a regulatory standpoint, what I am really impressed with in what’s happening in India is the public-private discourse and the partnership is very strong. The public sector is very engaged and very educated. It is very encouraging and it’s something that the world should take lead from. I think India is doing a very good job on not just the use of technology, but the responsible use of technology. I would recommend that it should continue to have this strong public private partnership.
How are you taking artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity ahead from a technology standpoint?
There is this notion that we always have – AI for the cybersecurity stack i.e. use AI to enhance cybersecurity. I think an equally big or even bigger market is going to be the use of cybersecurity to prevent AI models. If you think about it, AI models are largely and to some degree are like a CSV file. You need to make sure to have a way to secure the models and a way to make sure that in a multi-model world, with people having multiple and different models that they use, there’s a common security stack that can be applied across all of those. We are getting more robust in not just having AI added to our security stack but making sure that we can build security solutions for AI.
You work with telecom carriers, and you must have seen that they are very concerned about faster resolutions or automated response systems. How are you taking AI to them?
This is a big area of investment for us. We have some great AI talent in India, and they are building some very interesting stuff. This is on the contact centre and CX side. Think about virtual agents that answer some of your questions but keep the human in the loop. One of the things that I think from an AI philosophy is that it is not about eliminating jobs, it is about making sure that people get smarter in the job that they do. We are rebuilding a lot of sophisticated technology that’s going to be at the core fabric level that powers every experience that every customer has. The reason this is important is because if you think about a brand, this is very counterintuitive, and the loyalty of a consumer to the brand goes up, and when there is a problem and it’s handled well.
How is this adoption? Is it across all the industries?
Yes, it is across industries. Telecommunications is big, so are healthcare and financial services. Any kind of service industry where you have people needing to call, it tends to be a very common problem. The penalty of not doing it right can be so profound that it impacts the revenue. It takes a lot of time for a brand to recover from one very bad experience and one good experience can create an advocate and an amplifier for the brand.
How are telecom operators integrating AI into cybersecurity?
Connectivity without security doesn’t make any sense. It’s a very logical business for them to extend into and when they provide the security, they can also provide managed services on top of the security because there’s such a shortage of skilled labour that those companies can provide the managed services to their customers.
How strong has been your collaboration portfolio, and is there anything that you have to offer to your customers when it comes to AI?
The business is going very strong. We grew last quarter. We showed growth last quarter. The system is going to be smart enough to realise that you have gotten up and it’ll automatically blur the background and mute you. As soon as it detects you are back, without any intervention, it will unblur the background and unmute you. It can also update you for the time you were not present. We have announced things like a brand-new AI Codec. You will need much less bandwidth to go out and have video and audio communicated, the quality of that will be much higher even when there’s packet loss. So, the experience will be much better for both audio and video and the collaboration aspects and it will get much more intelligent. We are moving that AI intelligence into the hardware level because we have an NVIDIA chip set in most of our hardware.
This post was originally published on 3rd party site mentioned in the title of this site