It may well prove to be a first in the global corporate world insofar as sheer numbers are concerned.
Cisco will begin deploying personalised AI agents to its entire workforce of around 90,000 employees starting this August, marking one of the largest enterprise-wide AI rollouts to date.
The initiative is aimed at boosting productivity by giving every employee an AI assistant capable of answering questions, automating routine tasks, and routing requests to the most suitable AI model.
According to Cisco Chief Financial Officer Mark Patterson, the company has designed the system to dynamically select the best AI model for each task, helping optimise both performance and costs. Much of the AI infrastructure will also run on Cisco’s own systems to improve control over data and reduce token usage.
The rollout will be accompanied by employee upskilling programmes and is expected to support innovation across functions such as finance and operations. However, Cisco executives acknowledged that adopting AI at this scale will not be without challenges.
But what makes this move historic? Many other companies before Cisco have done this. Like Microsoft and Salesforce.
What makes the announcement notable is its scale. Around 90,000 employees will each get a personalized AI agent. Multiple reports describe it as “one of the largest” enterprise-wide AI agent deployments.