Cisco Puts Big AI Infrastructure Into Small Packages

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2024-11-08 12:30:02

Generative AI is still very much an emerging technology and it’s morphing and evolving rapidly, as is illustrated with the trend toward agentic AI, which we’ve written about previously. But enterprise adoption is ramping quickly and organizations are moving from testing out the technology to applying it to various use cases.

Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute, saw that at a recent meeting of the IT vendor’s Customer Advisory Board, where almost all of the companies said they had AI projects underway to one degree or another.

“Some of those projects might be starting in the cloud and some of those projects might be starting in projects on-prem, but we’re seeing that process accelerate over the last six months or more from where it was and we think it’s just going to continue to go faster,” Foster told The Next Platform. “Some of them made initial orders and they are waiting on delivery. Between the order and delivery, they’re defining their use cases and how they’re going to develop those applications to deliver value. It’s still very early in the enterprise, but it’s not one or two organizations of ten, it’s eight or nine. When they get there, it’s all going to come very, very fast.”

One challenge they’ll have to contend with is ensuring they have the right infrastructure to run AI workloads. According to Cisco’s AI Readiness Index, 89 percent of IT professionals surveyed said they plan to deploy AI workloads within the next two years, but only 14 percent said their infrastructure is ready for the jobs. Overhauling infrastructure can be a costly and complex proposition.