Cisco: Internal AI Assistant Deployed to 100,000+ Global Employees, Saving 5 Hours/Week per User

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Cisco: Internal AI Assistant Deployed to 100,000+ Global Employees, Saving 5 Hours/Week per User

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Cisco deployed an internal AI-powered assistant to more than 100,000 global employees, where it has handled over 45 million interactions since launch and now processes an average of 156,000 prompts per day. According to Sujith Joseph, Principal Engineer at Cisco, 73% of users report increased productivity and an average time savings of five hours per week. The platform was purpose-built with security to keep corporate data in-house rather than exposing it to public AI training sets, addressing a concern shared by seven in ten executives who believe generative AI introduces new enterprise data security risks. The assistant was originally released in April 2023 on Azure OpenAI models, with automatic PII redaction and real-time prompt auditing. Eight months later, Cisco IT's design team reworked the user experience after early adoption reached only 30% of the workforce, primarily technical employees. The team conducted user research to identify high-friction workflows and added Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities built on Cisco People and Communities, Help Zone, the corporate website, and the internal SalesConnect knowledge base, enabling use cases such as IT support, troubleshooting, network monitoring, and onboarding assistance. Cisco's platform architecture combines an AI agent and Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, an enterprise agent registry, and hybrid multi-cloud orchestration across Azure OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and Cisco's internal Deep Network Model, with requests routed based on workload, latency, and reliability. Security guardrails from Cisco's AI Defense scan user prompts and MCP server tools for malicious code. The platform provides LLM-as-a-service and RAG-as-a-service to more than 4,300 internal teams and supports a registry of remote agents and MCP servers. Looking ahead, Cisco is evolving the assistant from a product into a dynamic platform through its newly formed Cisco Automation and AI Center, with Agent Registry and Agent Builder features that let employees tailor the tool to their workflows.