Key Summary
- Cisco says AI is speeding up cyberattacks and narrowing the time companies have to detect and fix vulnerabilities.
- The company is expanding its AI-based platform, Cisco IQ, to help organizations analyze network and security data, prioritize risks, and automate response.
- Cisco said Cisco IQ currently supports about 17,000 customer organizations and more than 22 million devices.
- The company cited customer results including lower support-ticket volume at Amorepacific and faster vulnerability reporting at Generali.
- Cisco also plans to add more agentic AI features, predictive analysis, and infrastructure modernization tools over the next six months.
Main Story
Cisco is moving to strengthen enterprise security and infrastructure management as AI-assisted cyberattacks become more common and faster to execute. At Cisco Live APJC 2026 in Melbourne on the 10th, Jacqueline Guichela, who leads customer experience for Cisco in the Asia-Pacific, Japan and China region, outlined the company’s response to the changing threat environment.
Guichela said AI is helping attackers automate vulnerability discovery and exploitation, making traditional security operations harder to sustain. Cisco said AI-related attacks are involved in about 35% of cybersecurity incidents. The company also said the share of vulnerabilities exploited before or at disclosure has risen from 22% to 78% by 2026.
According to Cisco, the result is a shrinking window for organizations to identify exposed systems and take action. In response, the company is centering its strategy on Cisco IQ, an AI-based customer support and infrastructure management platform designed to consolidate network and security data and help companies find vulnerable assets more quickly.
Cisco said the platform supports roughly 17,000 customers and more than 22 million devices. It also described customer examples intended to show operational gains. Amorepacific, a South Korean company, reportedly reduced support tickets by 10% and increased network engineering productivity by 25% after using Cisco IQ to identify vulnerabilities earlier. Generali, the Italian insurer, cut the time needed to identify affected assets and produce actionable reports from four days to 10 minutes. Georgetown University in the United States also adopted the platform to improve network management across 6,500 access points and more than 500 switches, with more than 75,000 unique connections handled daily.
Cisco said it is extending Cisco IQ with integrations tied to ServiceNow and Wipro for IT operations and IT service management, as well as support for agentic SOC capabilities based on Splunk and Cisco Data Fabric. The company also said it has added features for assessing resilience against quantum computing and software and hardware denial-of-service attacks, issuing customized alerts for known issues, and using real-time device information for AI assistant functions. Cisco said it is also widening the platform’s availability for environments with limited external connectivity.
Looking ahead, Cisco plans to add agentic technology for its technical assistance center and predictive event analysis within the next six months. It also intends to support zero-trust assessment, trend analysis, AI-based migration, and tailored recommendations aimed at helping organizations modernize systems and strengthen resilience.
Guichela said the company sees the role of enterprise support shifting from post-incident troubleshooting toward proactive risk management and infrastructure modernization. Cisco said its focus is on helping customers diagnose weaknesses in their environments, upgrade older systems, and prepare for the security and operational demands of broader agentic AI adoption.
Background
The supplied article did not provide additional background beyond the event in Melbourne, Cisco’s current platform strategy, and the customer examples cited in the report.
Items Requiring Further Verification
- The claim that AI-related attacks are involved in about 35% of cybersecurity incidents is attributed to Cisco and would benefit from independent verification.
- The figures saying exploitation before or at disclosure rose from 22% to 78% by 2026 are presented without methodology in the supplied text.
- Customer performance claims for Amorepacific, Generali, and Georgetown University are company-reported examples and were not independently substantiated in the article.
- The plan to add agentic technology, predictive event analysis, and related features over the next six months is forward-looking and remains to be confirmed upon implementation.