Giant Cybersecurity and Software Developing company Cisco has rolled out a personal AI agent for all of its 90,000 global employees this week.
The AI agent, called MyAgent, is personalized to each employee, Cisco Executive Vice President of Operations Thimaya Subaiya recently told me in an exclusive interview.
Cisco’s AI agent program is one of the first examples of a widespread agent rollout inside a large company, and one where the autonomous bots are set to accomplish a variety of tasks on behalf of their humans.
AI agents have become more powerful and capable of performing different tasks, from writing code to answering customer support inquiries and analyzing financial data. Agent adoption also has been growing among businesses—helping drive the usage of tokens and compute that pushed Nvidia to yet another blowout quarter yesterday.
But there are still plenty of agent rollout challenges tech leaders are grappling with, including “AI agent sprawl,” cybersecurity risks and token costs.
At Cisco, the decision to give every employee an AI agent was driven by the need to consolidate the AI tools it used inside the company. The company then expanded its agent rollout to encourage employees to use AI to get everyday tasks done.
“I truly believe that you cannot replace humans entirely with AI,” Subaiya told me. “What you can do is very successfully augment people with AI.”
One way employees have used their AI agents is to manage their inbox: summarizing emails, filtering out spam messages and automatically drafting responses. Other examples include summarizing and analyzing market news and providing predictions on stock-market movement.
Each Cisco agent pulls relevant context about an employee in real time through secure enterprise connectors based on existing user permissions. The agent is accessed through a desktop application or a mobile app, and employees can chat with it through the Cisco-owned Webex videoconferencing software.
Cisco’s agents are designed so they can call upon enterprise systems and over 800 subagents on the back end. Those subagents perform the tasks employees prompt them for, such as tracking variances in a sales forecast and automatically sending an anomaly notification.
The agents are built only to interact with the humans they support. In other words, agents don’t interact with other agents or other employees—they only take requests from their assigned humans, and any external action requires explicit human signoff, Subaiya said.
Controlling the data that agents are able to access is also a key component of their design. The company built a “policy server” that prevents agents from doing things like deleting data sets, and stops Cisco data from being used to train third-party models, Subaiya said.
To manage the higher costs of using always-on AI agents for every employee, Cisco is using tools including a token-monitoring feature from Splunk, the cybersecurity and analytics company it bought in 2024.
The company also has built an “intelligent router”—which functions like a model harness—to automatically direct tasks to the most capable and cost-efficient AI model. On top of that, Cisco operates its own data center, where it has graphics processing units, or GPUs, that run open-weight models.
Roughly 50% to 60% of Cisco’s AI requests are routed through open-weight models, and 20% to 30% rely on software automation. The remainder is “a very small percentage” that actually goes out to a foundation model, according to Subaiya.
