Cisco Deploys Personal AI Agents to 90,000 Employees

Introduction

A Cisco employee may no longer need to open Outlook, Webex, Jira, and SharePoint one by one, search through messages and documents, create a task, and notify colleagues manually. In Cisco’s vision, the employee states a goal and the desired outcome. A personal AI agent then determines which information is needed, which systems to call, and how to move the work forward under appropriate human supervision.

Cisco has begun rolling out MyAgent to roughly 90,000 employees worldwide. It is not a standalone foundation model. Instead, it is a coordinating layer built on Circuit, Cisco’s internal AI platform. The important development is therefore not simply the number of users. It is the shift from AI that answers questions to AI that organizes and executes work.

Key points

• From chat interface to action layer. MyAgent can bring together information from different systems, help organize inboxes, draft replies, summarize market information, or investigate a project delay by combining emails, meeting records, and Jira data before preparing follow-up communications.
• Circuit provides the foundation. The platform can connect Azure OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Cisco’s own models, open-weight models, internal agents, and conventional automation. Requests can be routed according to capability, cost, latency, and reliability rather than sent to the most powerful model by default.
• Execution remains supervised. MyAgent can call specialist agents, use data according to an employee’s existing permissions, and continue working after the user leaves the chat window. The available material does not suggest unrestricted authority to perform high-risk actions; human oversight remains a core boundary.
• Persistent memory does not mean remembering everything. Cisco has publicly referred to preferences, past interactions, and work context. It has not detailed retention periods, item-level review and deletion, or how different types of memories will be governed.
• Scale raises governance and cost questions. Cisco says Circuit has processed more than 45 million interactions, while 73% of users reported productivity gains and an average weekly saving of five hours. These are company-reported figures and should not automatically be treated as proof of durable business value. More agentic interactions can also mean more model calls, verification, compute, and review costs.

Why it matters

MyAgent points toward a workplace in which employees interact less with individual SaaS interfaces and more with a personal layer above them. The underlying applications will not disappear: agents still need structured data, stable APIs, permission models, and reversible actions. What may change is whether every employee must learn the detailed interface and workflow of every system.

For Cisco, the rollout is also an internal “customer zero” exercise. The company wants to use its capabilities in networking, security, collaboration, data centers, and Splunk to validate how enterprise agents should be connected, monitored, governed, and priced before turning those lessons into customer offerings.

The decisive test is not how many models are connected or how many agents are registered. It is whether the system can close more work loops while remaining explainable, traceable, and reversible—and whether employees are willing to entrust it with long-term work context. The enterprise question is moving from “Should we use AI?” to “How much authority are we prepared to give it?”

Source: InfoQ 中文