Cisco executives make the case that the excellence between product and mannequin corporations is disappearing, and that accessing the 55% of enterprise knowledge development that present AI ignores will separate winners from losers.
VentureBeat not too long ago caught up with Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer and DJ Sampath, Senior Vice President of AI Software program and Platform, to achieve new insights right into a compelling thesis each leaders share. They and their groups contend that each profitable product firm should develop into an AI mannequin firm to outlive the subsequent decade.
When one considers how compressed product lifecycles have gotten, mixed with the numerous benefits of digital twin expertise to speed up time-to-market of next-gen merchandise, the thesis is sensible.
The dialog revealed why this transformation is inevitable, backed by strong knowledge factors. The crew contends that 55% of all knowledge development is machine knowledge that present AI fashions don't contact. OpenAI's Greg Brockman estimates we’d like 10 billion GPUs to provide each human the AI brokers they'll want, and Cisco's open supply safety mannequin, Basis-Sec-8B, has already seen 200,000 downloads on Hugging Face.
Why the mannequin is changing into the product
VentureBeat: You've acknowledged that sooner or later, each product firm will develop into a mannequin firm. Why is that this inevitable quite than only one potential path?
Jeetu Patel: Sooner or later, there's no distinction between mannequin corporations and product corporations. Nice product corporations might be mannequin corporations. The shut tie-in between mannequin and product is a closed loop. To boost the product, you improve the mannequin, not only a UI shim.
These corporations being fashioned proper now which are a skinny shim on high of a mannequin; their days are numbered. The true moat is the mannequin you construct that drives product habits. This requires being concurrently good at two issues: constructing nice fashions in domains the place you’ve nice knowledge, and constructing nice product experiences powered by these fashions in an iterative loop the place the fashions adapt and evolve when you’ve product enhancement requests.
DJ Sampath: This turns into much more essential when you concentrate on issues shifting to brokers. Brokers are going to be ruled by these fashions. Your moat is admittedly going to be how effectively your mannequin reacts to the modifications it must.
Harnessing machine knowledge's development is vital
VentureBeat: You talked about that 55% of information development is machine knowledge, but present fashions aren't skilled on it. Why does this characterize such a large alternative?
Patel: Thus far, fashions have been superb at being skilled on publicly out there, human-generated knowledge freely out there on the web. However we're carried out with the quantity of public knowledge you may crawl. The place else do you go subsequent? It's all locked up inside enterprises.
55% of information development is machine knowledge, however fashions should not skilled on machine knowledge. Each firm says 'my knowledge is my moat,' however most don't have an efficient strategy to situation that knowledge into an organized pipeline to allow them to prepare AI with it and harness its full potential.
Think about how a lot log knowledge might be generated when brokers work 24/7 and each human has 100 brokers. Greg Brockman from OpenAI mentioned in the event you assume each human has a GPU, you're three orders of magnitude away from the place you want to be; you want 10 billion GPUs. While you suppose that manner, in the event you don't prepare your fashions with machine knowledge successfully, you're incomplete in your means to harness the complete potential of AI.
Sampath: Many of the fashions are being skilled on public knowledge. The info that's inside enterprises is generally machine knowledge. We're unlocking that machine knowledge. We give every enterprise a beginning mannequin. Consider it as a starter package. They'll take that mannequin and construct functions and brokers fine-tuned on their proprietary knowledge inside their enterprises. We're going to be a mannequin firm, however we're additionally going to make it extremely simple for each single enterprise to construct their very own fashions utilizing the infrastructure we offer.
Why {hardware} corporations have a bonus
VentureBeat: Many see {hardware} as a legal responsibility within the software program and AI period. You argue the alternative. Why?
Patel: Lots of people look down on {hardware}. I really suppose {hardware} is a superb asset to have, as a result of if you know the way to construct nice {hardware} and nice software program and nice AI fashions and tie all of them collectively, that's when magic begins to occur.
Take into consideration what we are able to do by correlating machine knowledge from logs with our time sequence mannequin. If there's a one-degree change in your swap or router, you would possibly predict system failure in three days, one thing you couldn't correlate earlier than. You establish the change, reroute visitors to forestall issues, and clear up the difficulty. Get rather more predictive in outages and infrastructure stability.
Cisco is the essential infrastructure firm for AI. This utterly modifications the extent of stability we are able to generate for our infrastructure. Manufacturing is likely one of the high industries for the info quantity generated every day. Mixed with agentic AI and collected metadata, it utterly modifications the aggressive nature of producing or asset-intensive industries. With sufficient knowledge, they will transcend disruptions round tariffs or provide chain variations, getting them out of worth and availability commoditization.
Cisco's deep dedication to Open Supply
VentureBeat: Why make your safety fashions open supply when that appears to provide away aggressive benefit?
Sampath: The cat is out of the bag; attackers even have entry to open supply fashions. The following step is equipping as many defenders as potential with fashions that make protection stronger. That's actually what we did at RSAC 2025 once we launched our open supply mannequin, Basis-Sec-8B.
Funding for open supply initiatives has stalled. There's an elevated drain within the open supply group, needing sustainable, collaborative funding sources. It's a company duty to make these fashions out there, plus it supplies entry to communities to start out working with AI from a protection perspective.
We've built-in ClamAV, a broadly used open supply antivirus device, with Hugging Face, which hosts over 2 million fashions. Each single mannequin will get scanned for malware. It’s a must to make sure the AI provide chain is appropriately protected, and we're on the forefront of doing that.
Patel: We launched not simply the safety mannequin that's open supply, but additionally one on Splunk for time sequence knowledge. These correlate knowledge; time sequence and safety incident knowledge, to have the ability to discover very fascinating outcomes. With 200,000 downloads on Hugging Face, we're seeing resellers beginning to construct functions with it.
Taking the purchasers' pulse after Cisco Dwell
VentureBeat: Following Cisco Dwell's product launches, how are clients responding?
Patel: There are three classes. First, utterly ecstatic clients: 'We've been asking for this for some time. Hallelujah.'
Second, these saying 'I'm going to do this out.' DJ reveals them a demo with white glove remedy, they do a POC, and so they're dumbfounded that it's even higher than what we mentioned in three minutes on stage.
Third are skeptics who confirm that each announcement comes out on the precise days. That group was once a lot greater three years in the past. Because it's shrunk, we've seen significant enhancements in our monetary outcomes and the way the market sees us.
We don't discuss issues three years out, solely inside a six-month window. The payload is so giant that we’ve got sufficient to debate for six months. Our largest problem, frankly, is holding our clients updated with the rate of innovation we’ve got.
Obsessing over clients, not {hardware}
VentureBeat: How are you migrating your hardware-centric put in base with out creating an excessive amount of disruption?
Patel: Fairly than fixating on '{hardware} versus software program,' you begin from the place the shopper is. Your technique can not be a perimeter-based firewall for community safety as a result of the market has moved. It's hyper-distributed. However you presently have firewalls that want environment friendly administration.
We're supplying you with a completely refreshed firewall lineup. If you wish to take a look at what we've carried out with public cloud, managing egress visitors with Multicloud Protection with zero belief, not simply user-to-application, however application-to-application. We've constructed Hypershield expertise. We've constructed a revolutionary Good Change. All managed by the identical Safety Cloud Management with AI Canvas on high.
We inform our clients they will go at their very own tempo. Begin with firewalls, transfer to Multicloud Protection, add Hypershield enforcement factors with Cilium for observability, and add Good Switches. You don't have so as to add extra complexity as a result of we’ve got a real platform benefit with Safety Cloud Management. Fairly than saying 'neglect every part and transfer to the brand new factor', creating an excessive amount of cognitive load, we begin the place the shopper is and take them by way of the journey.
What's subsequent: energizing world companions to show AI right into a income alternative
The interview concluded with discussions of November's Companion Summit in San Diego, the place Cisco plans vital associate activation bulletins. As Patel famous, "Sustained, constant emphasis is required to get the complete reseller engine shifting." VentureBeat is satisfied {that a} globally robust associate group is indispensable for any cybersecurity firm to realize its long-term AI imaginative and prescient.
