We’re within the midst of an infrastructure build-out of historic proportions, pushed by the calls for of AI. Some estimates mission that spending on AI infrastructure might method 2% of the US GDP in 2025 alone[1]. We haven’t seen a capital expenditure wave of this magnitude because the nice industrial booms of the previous, just like the enlargement of the railroads.
And but, beneath this tidal wave of funding, a elementary fact stays: whereas expertise evolves quickly, the underlying infrastructure lifecycle phases keep fixed. Each mission strikes by way of the basic phases: Plan, Design, Implement, Function, and Optimize. That is the journey our prospects take, whether or not the ‘Implement’ section is a greenfield deployment or a fancy brownfield migration.
At Cisco Buyer Expertise, we assist our prospects throughout your entire infrastructure lifecycle. Our Skilled Companies interact throughout all phases, from preliminary planning and design to the continual cycle of optimization and eventual safe decommissioning. Our Help Companies transcend break repair to assist prospects with Implement, Function, and Optimize phases.
Traditionally, the handoffs between these phases have been inefficient. Designs are interpreted by people after which transformed into code. Operational knowledge is manually analyzed to tell optimizations. This course of is gradual, error-prone, and loses crucial context at each step. At Cisco, we imagine there’s a higher means.
Our aim with Cisco IQ is to create a seamless digital thread that connects each stage of the lifecycle. By leveraging Gen AI, ML, automation, and data base, we intention to make your entire course of quicker and extra dependable. Cisco IQ is a unified, AI-powered interface designed to be the widespread basis for all of Cisco’s Help and Skilled Companies. At this time, as we launch Cisco IQ, now in Early Discipline Trials, I need to share the engineering structure and the core ideas behind it.
The Basic Shift: From Instruments to Intelligence
For too lengthy, the supply of companies has been fragmented, with Help and Skilled Companies utilizing totally different instruments optimized for particular capabilities or lifecycle phases. This has led to a fragmented expertise the place prospects, companions, and Cisco groups spend extra time on knowledge assortment and gear upkeep than on high-value evaluation.
Cisco IQ represents a shift from this tool-centric mannequin to an intelligence-centric one. It’s a multi-persona system, serving prospects, companions, and our personal companies groups by way of an API-first structure. Our goal is to show a long time of institutional data right into a dwelling, adaptive system that makes your infrastructure smarter, extra resilient, and safer.
The Core Architectural Pillars
To ship on this imaginative and prescient, we engineered Cisco IQ round 4 foundational pillars.
1.Information Material: A Digital Mannequin of the Lifecycle. The muse of any clever system is its knowledge and context. Information Material creates a complete digital mannequin of the infrastructure lifecycle, connecting knowledge from planning by way of operations. It’s designed to deal with the complete spectrum of information—structured, unstructured, static, dynamic, batch, streaming, and MELT (Metrics, Occasions, Logs, Traces). That is the bedrock that gives simple, standardized entry to all needed context.
2.Doc Intelligence and Data Administration. Cisco’s biggest asset is our a long time of accrued data. Cisco IQ is designed to unlock it. We use a classy mixture of doc intelligence, data graphs, and LLM-based reasoning to transform our huge library of unstructured content material—product documentation, design guides, and safety insurance policies—into structured, retrievable data. By utilizing retrieval-augmented technology (RAG), we make sure that when the system supplies a solution, it’s correct, explainable, and grounded in verified Cisco knowledge.
3.Generative AI and Principled Automation. Enterprise operations demand determinism. You count on the identical enter to supply the identical end result, each time. Nevertheless, the LLMs that allow a lot innovation are probabilistic by nature. Reconciling this can be a core engineering problem. We’ve constructed a system of guardrails—from RAG to schema enforcement and Human-in-the-Loop (HIL) validation—to ship deterministic outcomes from these probabilistic fashions. This self-discipline ensures that our AI-generated automation is dependable and reliable, and it’s a sensible utility of our Accountable AI ideas.
4.API-First Design with Trendy, Evolving Interfaces Cisco IQ is engineered to be API-first. We imagine that programmatic entry is key to fashionable IT operations. All capabilities are uncovered by way of well-designed APIs that adhere to Cisco’s API design ideas, enabling deep integration into your current toolchains and workflows. Whereas APIs present the muse, human interplay requires a versatile and intuitive expertise. Constructed on prime of those APIs is our Multi-Modal UI. Completely different duties require totally different views, so we offer three built-in interfaces:
- Dashboards: For monitoring recognized metrics and KPIs. That is the dependable bedrock of operations.
- Conversational AI: For open-ended, pure language questions. That is the invention device for investigating points.
- Generative UI: For complicated evaluation the place the system creates the very best visualization—a chart, map, or timeline—to clarify the information. That is the perception engine.
Our dedication to fashionable interfaces doesn’t cease right here. We’re planning for Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interfaces to allow deeper, extra automated integrations. The AI ecosystem is evolving quickly, and so will our interfaces. Cisco IQ is designed to maintain tempo, making certain you at all times have the suitable device for the job, whether or not you’re a developer, an operator, or one other automated system.
From Structure to Utility: Concrete Companies in Cisco IQ
These architectural pillars allow a set of highly effective, built-in purposes, tailor-made for each Help and Skilled Companies engagements.
Capabilities for Cisco Help
Predictive Asset Insights: Solves the persistent problem of asset administration by reconciling knowledge from buy contracts, gadget telemetry, and assist circumstances right into a single, unified stock. It tracks lifecycle milestones and delivers related Discipline Notices and Safety Advisories, enabling proactive infrastructure administration.
Adaptive Infrastructure Assessments: Offers a standardized evaluation framework throughout a number of domains, from operational well being to safety hardening. It makes use of AI to interpret best-practice guides, generates tailor-made evaluation plans, analyzes your configurations, produces structured findings, and supplies prioritized suggestions.
AI-Powered Troubleshooting: Redefines the assist expertise. It features a fashionable case administration interface with an AI assistant for extra environment friendly interplay. Behind the scenes, our agentic AI drives the troubleshooting course of, using each hypothesis-driven and evidence-driven strategies—similar to an skilled engineer—to systematically slim down root causes for quicker case decision. The agentic AI system additionally leverages digitized inside data (from our greatest people) in addition to the whole thing of previous points and options (through anonymized Root Trigger Evaluation notes) to tell the AI because it troubleshoots.
Capabilities for Cisco Skilled Companies
For Skilled Companies, the problem has at all times been scaling our deep technical experience persistently throughout each engagement. To resolve this, we’re introducing automated, data-driven workflows to enrich our human-led supply. Cisco IQ supplies the tooling to attain top quality, customized engagements at scale.
Digitized Supply Framework: This can be a suite of capabilities designed to automate the end-to-end Plan, Design, Implement, Function and Optimize processes. It transforms conventional workflows into totally automated, AI-ready processes for execution. Key parts embody:
- Digital Necessities Gathering: As an alternative of static paperwork, this supplies a centralized system to seize and combine buyer answer necessities. This ensures necessities are traceable, constant, and reusable throughout your entire supply
- Documentation Sharing: A safe, centralized house for sharing mission paperwork, designs, and plans, making certain all stakeholders are working from the identical context with clear model management and approval
- Documentation Automation: Empowers our engineers to create skilled, customer-ready deliverables by combining standardized knowledge fashions, reusable templates, and AI-assisted content material technology. This allows quicker, constant, and compliant documentation.
Know-how Migration Framework: This framework makes use of AI-driven insights from Cisco’s data base to generate orchestration templates for complicated migrations. It automates expertise transitions whereas making certain skilled oversight, minimizing handbook effort and threat. It additionally permits versatile integration into the shopper’s backend methods to ship constant outcomes throughout totally different expertise landscapes.
Automation Governance Framework: To handle the customized code usually required in complicated engagements, it supplies a safe and standardized setting for the lifecycle and execution of scripts. This ensures they’re managed, versioned, and executed safely with clever reporting to attain particular enterprise outcomes.
Check & Validation Framework: This framework automates testing throughout your entire change administration lifecycle, validating new designs, community adjustments, Strategies of Process (MOPs), and migration plans.
- It might optionally combine with buyer CI/CD instruments, and it leverages AI to speed up check setting design, check case creation, and outcomes evaluation.
- Most significantly, the framework is intelligence-driven, using the Information Material to share context from different lifecycle phases. This allows the creation of customizable assessments which are tailor-made to your particular enterprise wants and operational actuality.
Enterprise-Grade by Design
We perceive that for any of this to be helpful, it should meet the stringent safety and operational necessities of your enterprise.
Deployment Flexibility: Assembly Your Operational Actuality Cisco IQ is designed to fulfill you the place you’re. We provide three distinct deployment choices:
- SaaS: For groups prioritizing ease of use and speedy deployment, our cloud-hosted providing is perfect. A “Cloud-Help” element on-premises acts as a safe bridge between your methods and our cloud setting.
- On-Prem Tethered: For organizations with strict knowledge residency necessities, this feature combines the safety of on-premises knowledge storage with the comfort of receiving automated updates and new options from the cloud.
- On-Prem Air-Gapped: For organizations with probably the most stringent compliance and knowledge sovereignty mandates, akin to these in extremely regulated sectors. This deployment has no exterior connectivity, and all updates are utilized manually.
Safety on the Core: Our dedication to safety is constructed into each layer. For on-premises deployments, the digital machine is FIPS licensed, simplifying SecOps approval. Our cloud parts are engineered following rigorous safety finest practices. Throughout all fashions, no knowledge leaves your community with out your specific consent.
Buyer Management: You stay answerable for all operations and knowledge.
The Journey Forward
Cisco IQ is presently in Early Discipline Trials with a choose group of shoppers. Over the following six months, we are going to increase these trials, utilizing direct suggestions from real-world use circumstances to information our improvement.
As we transfer towards basic availability, deliberate for Q2 of 2026, Cisco IQ will turn into a foundational ingredient of Cisco Help, setting a brand new bar for the worth and capabilities prospects can count on from our premium tiers. We’re additionally dedicated to empowering our companions by offering versatile entry by way of the graphical person interface, upcoming APIs, and resell alternatives through Cisco Companion Help.
That is being created together with your real-world challenges in thoughts. To be taught extra about our roadmap or categorical curiosity in future trials, attain out to your Cisco account crew.
Study extra:
[1] Supply: Enterprise analyst Paul Kedrosky: https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/
