Cisco Wants To Use AI To Defend AI At Machine Scale Techzine Talks On Tour podcast

Cisco wants to use AI to defend AI at machine scale

1d ago 25:36

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Cisco made a swath of announcements at RSAC 2025 Conference. Unsurprisingly, several of them had something to do with AI. We sat down with Cisco's Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel to have a conversation about where he and Cisco thinks things are going.

When we spoke to Patel last year, he was quite optimistic. The use of AI in security solutions was going to mean that the defenders would, at least temporarily, get the upper hand.

Between last year and now, a lot has happened, especially in the field of AI. The big question now is how to secure the use of AI in organizations. That's what many of the companies at RSAC Conference focused on this year. With the agentic wave of AI upon is, and new things like Agent-to-Agent and the MCP protocol that come with it, this is a very important challenge to tackle.

To us, two things stood out in Cisco's announcements this week. One was the deepening of the partnership with ServiceNow, with an integration between Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow SecOps. The other was the launch of Foundation AI and an open-source AI security model. Patel frames the latter innovation as follows: "You don't go to your dentist for heart surgery. Domain knowledge matters in AI and models."
Apart from the topics above, we also discuss the agentic future of security itself. This is important, because that enables defenders to elevate security from human to machine scale. That is especially important when facing machine-scale attacks. As Patel notes, "The models are going to get smarter... and as they get smarter, you'll find a tremendous amount of autonomy injected into workflows."

This and much more in this latest episode of Techzine Talks on Tour.

Chapters

1. The Tables Turning for Defenders (00:00:00)

2. Three Core Security Challenges (00:04:22)

3. Securing AI and AI Defense (00:06:32)

4. Open-Weight Security Model Launch (00:09:52)

5. Agentic Workflows and Multi-Agent Systems (00:13:32)

6. Strategic Partnerships in the AI Era (00:16:42)

7. The Future: Autonomy with Human Oversight (00:21:32)

35 episodes