Cisco’s in-house AI assistant is a jack of all trades

Since the advent of ChatGPT, enterprises have been intent on transforming generative AI’s potential as a digital assistant into productivity enhancements in every pocket of the organization. Networking giant Cisco is one company that has been at the leading edge of that pursuit. The original idea for an internal assistant started at Cisco as ChatGPT and other consumer-grade AI tools launched in late 2022 and early 2023, and Cisco’s leadership debated whether to allow employees to use them, says Srini Namineni , chief automation officer at Cisco. “The big question was, Should we actually block it?” he says. “The risks were clear when people can put company data in there, and someone else may see this data. We made a deliberate choice saying, ‘Instead of blocking it, let us give them a secure alternative.’” That initial internal AI assistant project, launched in late 2023, was also conceived to consolidate what could have become a fragmented internal AI ecosystem into one platform, while allowing employees the flexibility to connect to multiple AI models. The AI assistant, which originally included Azure OpenAI and Google Gemini, can now integrate new models within a couple of weeks of an employee’s request, Namineni says. And it has since grown into a multifunction combination copilot, coding assistant, HR assistant, and jack of all trades that allows employees to add AI capabilities to a wide range of work activities. The AI assistant, which earned Cisco a 2026 CIO 100 Award for IT innovation and leadership, saves company engineers an average of six hours per week and other employees an average of five hours, according to the company. While the main goals of the project were security and flexibility, Cisco has found a third benefit: With a monthly cost per user at about $10, the internal AI assistant operates below the subscription prices of several off-the-shelf AI assistants, Namineni says. Mitigating AI risk The tool, available to employees since 2024, had more than 96,000 users as of the first quarter of 2026, with 90% employee adoption. It has received high marks from employees, with 79% of employees believing the internal assistant saves them time, 72% saying it increases productivity, and 71% noting that it improves the quality of their work, according to internal polling.For example, the tool has accelerated software development at Cisco by helping developers find tiny bugs and generate unit tests, the company says. Namineni and his team have helped ensure employee use of the tool by continually adding new features, giving the AI assistant more functionality than some off-the-shelf assistants have. Employees can share AI prompts with one another through the assistant, and they can handle HR tasks such as scheduling vacation days without logging into another service. The assistant also enables employees to upload proprietary datasets to secure OneDrive folders for customized projects and offers retrieval augmented generation (RAG) as a service for secure querying of internal Cisco documents and metadata. The Cisco project is built on a microservices architecture, allowing for quick onboarding of new AI applications, according to the company. Cisco has pitched the assistant as an AI teammate, envisioning a virtual staff of AI agents for every employee. Evolution coming Namineni envisions several new features, including agents personalized to assist each employee on a constant basis. These personalized agents could connect to employees’ email and Webex Meetings account and take actions on their behalf, with permission. A personalized agent could sort emails based on priority, for example. He also sees the assistants taking on more HR and finance tasks, freeing up employees to perform higher-level work. Employees will have control, though, he notes. “I am not ready to let go of 100% control unless it’s a low-value activity where I’m OK with it making a mistake because it does make mistakes,” Namineni says. “Our challenge is, how do we take this power, contain it in the use cases where it can do as much work as it can, and still have human in the loop?” In addition to the CIO 100 Award, the Cisco project has earned other accolades as well. The AI assistant can be a model for other large enterprises that want to encourage employees to safely use AI, says Amy Loomis , group vice president for workplace solutions at IT analyst firm IDC. Follow the logic Other companies can adopt the logic of the approach, although they may decide not to replicate Cisco’s specific technical stack, she says. The architecture, including dual model integration, hybrid multicloud orchestration, RAG as a service, and microservices, reflects Cisco’s scale and engineering capacity, she notes. The underlying set of decisions is sound, she adds. Companies should give employees a governed internal AI environment before shadow AI proliferates; address fragmented tools with a unified intelligent interface; build access controls that keep humans accountable for what AI tools do on their behalf; and frame AI to employees as something that raises the quality and reach of their work. Cisco’s innovation lies in how the individual components of the AI assistant work as a system, Loomis says. Several individual pieces, including RAG pipelines, GPT-4o access, OneDrive integration, microservices architecture, are available elsewhere, but Cisco has put them all together. “What is less common is combining them inside a governed, enterprise-owned environment with explicit data controls, rather than routing employee queries through external AI services where sensitive data can enter public training datasets,” she adds. Loomis points to the My Projects feature that allows employees to upload proprietary datasets to secured OneDrive folders for customized Q&A. This approach gives employees the functionality they need when they otherwise would turn to unauthorized external tools, she says. Loomis also praised Cisco for framing AI as an amplification layer for human capabilities. “Giving every employee access to a set of AI tools calibrated to their role and work context is a change management choice as much as a technology one,” she says. “Organizations that position AI this way, as something that sharpens what employees can do rather than substituting for how they do it, tend to achieve broader adoption because they reduce the resistance that slows rollout.”