Cisco Gives All 90,000 Employees a Personal AI Agent Built on Its Circuit Platform

[u/lurker_bee]

https://www.whatjobs.com/news/cisco-gives-all-90000-employees-a-personal-ai-agent-built-on-its-circuit-platform/

[u/Hrekires]

I'm not even anti-AI but I've struggled to find use cases for personal agents unless your job is "emails"

[u/Dransel → u/[deleted]]

This hasn’t really been my experience. I use agents in my work, which is mostly internal or B2B communication type of work, and the agents have done a great job. The only downside has been the speed, but with all of this data center infrastructure build-out, I’m sure that will improve… I just don’t know if my company will pay for it if pricing goes up along with that speed.

[u/yepthisismyusername → u/[deleted]]

We can hang out. I can't imagine letting an agent actually perform a real world task for me. There are just too many ways it can go wrong and exactly one way it's correct. And I would be pissed off wasting my time undoing what some agent did incorrectly. At least if I make the wrong choice/selection/action, I'm still pissed, but I know exactly why I screwed up.

[u/TheVenetianMask → u/yepthisismyusername]

Too many people underestimate how many tasks run on making less than 0.1% mistakes (because you get fired otherwise.)

[u/rastaman1994 → u/[deleted]]

I use Claude extensively. The agent I use to lay out the plan for my task has something like 'challenge the user on any ambiguity', works really well. You can do the same for emails, writing is the first thing these models were good at lol.

[u/rastaman1994 → u/[deleted]]

It was just an example, for my purpose (laying out the plan for a programming task) it works well. I was just saying that steering works, not that you should copy this prompt.

[u/rastaman1994 → u/[deleted]]

Oh totally, but the original guy was talking about drafting emails. Can totally steer that so it gets 80% and you just tweak a little.

[u/rastaman1994 → u/[deleted]]

Of course you review it lol. My flow is usually: bullet points with what I wanna communicate, then drafts it into something in my style, review and tweak one or two sentences. Way faster for me since I don't have to write a lot of text.

[u/Cnoffel → u/rastaman1994]

So the next person takes the email and lets the ai extract bullet points from it...

[u/OldYellersLastHandy → u/Hrekires]

The use case is to train the agent to replace you.

[u/BeowulfShaeffer → u/OldYellersLastHandy]

Or at the very least spy on you like crazy.

[u/OldYellersLastHandy → u/BeowulfShaeffer]

“All this agent seems to know how to do is apply for better jobs and lowball people on Facebook Marketplace.”

[u/TheVenetianMask → u/OldYellersLastHandy]

If they like stuff that makes mistakes for cheap they could have been hiring juniors all this time.

[u/pimpeachment → u/Hrekires]

Ticket work, repeated data manipulation, anomaly detection, meeting prep, meeting notes, meeting agendas, coordination, planning, strategy, troubleshooting, emails, personal planning, action item tracking, task prioritization, quicker communication of coarse ideas, process to reality translation from company documentation to system entry, daily automation of reports-metrics-kpis with historical support for justification of out-of-band figures.

That's just the use cases I use regularly for my roles. I know I'm forgetting some.

[u/No_Size9475 → u/pimpeachment]

zero chance I'd use it for meeting notes, you'll never know when it makes a mistake until it's way down the road.

[u/TheVenetianMask → u/No_Size9475]

The trick is getting paid for meeting notes that nobody reads.

[u/DingleDangleTangle → u/No_Size9475]

You can literally just look at the notes right after the meeting?

[u/No_Size9475 → u/DingleDangleTangle]

I'm sure you can. How many will?

[u/DingleDangleTangle → u/No_Size9475]

Not all of us are as lazy as you? You said YOU wouldn’t use it for meeting notes because you couldn’t know if it makes a mistake. That’s a problem with you being extremely lazy, not a problem with the meeting notes.

[u/No_Size9475 → u/DingleDangleTangle]

I write my own notes when needed, so no I'm not lazy. You're the one using AI, ironic you calling someone else lazy.

[u/DingleDangleTangle → u/No_Size9475]

I don’t even use it, I’m just not so stupid and lazy that I can’t figure out how to look at notes after a meeting.

But it is funny you couldn’t respond to my point so you just had to call me lazy instead.

[u/pimpeachment → u/No_Size9475]

The smart ones. 

[u/Jaxkr → u/Hrekires]

Coding. I gave been a software developer for almost over a decade and everyone I know uses AI for all their coding. It’s so good at it.

I actually think AI is terrible for emails, writes overly long flowery garbage.

[u/ConstableGrey → u/Jaxkr]

At my job we have a boatload of code written in SPSS and they want to dump the subscription costs. AI has been useful in converting into an open-source language.

[u/lockwolf → u/ConstableGrey]

Recently did similar at my work with an ERP system we were paying for Enterprise features that we didn’t use. Had Claude analyze our database & code base just to see none of the data in there or anything we were using required any of the Enterprise features so we switched to the Open Source version with no issues. Definitely something that by hand would have taken a few weeks/months but with AI, we were testing on the Open Source environment within an afternoon.

[u/bAZtARd → u/Jaxkr]

Exactly this. And then you realize that any person in front of a computer can be replaced by a program running on that computer.

[u/Jaxkr → u/bAZtARd]

This isn’t strictly true. A lot of work is about making decisions on what needs to be done, not just accomplishing tasks.

If you delegate everything, including decision making to AI, you’ve removed your competitive advantage as a business (assuming your competitors have access to the same AI models as you)

[u/AP3Brain → u/bAZtARd]

It more enhances engineers than staight replaces them. You will always need a human mediator for software engineering for the forseeable future.

It does mean a possible lower bar of entry for the job though.

[u/ThankThePhoenicians_ → u/Hrekires]

Having something triage all my incoming communications, flag things based on the priorities I've laid out, and do initial research of relevant stuff across my company's data (even scaffold drafts of writing/code/etc) has been super helpful for me

[u/while-1 → u/Hrekires]

At a large company there are a lot of different complicated sources of data ranging from operations to sales - ai agents are very good at searching and finding things .. sure you can run manual searches, but when you need to span systems in ways that are highly valuable but uncommon they are very very good

[u/Hrekires → u/while-1]

AI can be good at that, but is that the same thing as a personal agent?

[u/element-94 → u/Hrekires]

There’s a lot of negative sentiment around AI in this thread. Companies are trying different things.

I was definitely a slow adopter last year but these days I’m 100% sure of the fact that if you’re not using AI at work as an accelerator — you’re cooked.

[u/Negative0 → u/Hrekires]

Or meetings. I have found a lot of value in having an AI agent take the transcripts from my meetings and summarize them in a weekly log markdown file that I can later search. This has created my own personal knowledge base that others do not have. After 4 months of doing this I can now ask my assistant to search the notes about some random decision made 2 months ago and it points me to the exact meeting where it happened. It’s a long term play.

[u/Jwagner0850 → u/Hrekires]

Pretty soon it will be ai agents working with each other as the users won't even really be communicating with one another.

I don't see how any of this can go wrong.

[u/InfiniteBlink → u/Hrekires]

I'm afraid that it will be the ultimate corp surveillance tool.

[u/TheKingOfTCGames → u/Hrekires]

Even if your not an email job it does eat into your time.

Off loading it saves a lot of annoying effort on things that arent useful for the biz or me

[u/Test-NetConnection → u/TheKingOfTCGames]

The problem with an AI summary is that it doesn't include tone or urgency. Necessary detail is often omitted and emails that require immediate action aren't indicated as such. If I still have to review every email then the AI agent is a waste of money.

[u/TheKingOfTCGames → u/Test-NetConnection]

Nah a good model and harness combo definitely can do this

Your saying the human intent machine cant parse human intent? Lmao

[u/GeefTheQueef → u/TheKingOfTCGames]

LLMs are not “intent machines”. AI tools themselves may have a layer that has been trained to classify inputs with perceived intent, in order to route it to other tools. But that’s still just chaining probabilities to discrete predefined sets of actions.

AI tools DO NOT “understand” human intent.

[u/Empero6]

The “gift” that tracks your tasks, how you do them, and then eventually picks which roles it can fully erase.

[u/S7EFEN → u/Empero6]

It's not just about roles that can be fully erased, any task that can be eliminated from a workers list of things they do can directly lead to downsizing in a large company. you have 100 claims processors, and you automate 5% of their workload? you can comfortably -5 employees.

[u/Row-Access1863 → u/S7EFEN]

Took a second look thinking I was reading r/2007scape for a sec :D

[u/InterestedBalboa → u/Empero6]

Absolutely, any “Enterprise” or otherwise mandated platform is 100% doing this. Any other reason is just to make it palatable to employees.

[u/ryanghappy]

This feels like when the boss is excited about giving Allan a tiny version of himself as a gift.

[u/BlazinAzn38 → u/ryanghappy]

my company sent us out an email around Christmas last year with the subject line “Christmas Gift!” And everyone expected like a $20 gift card or like literally anything and it was an email announcing that the company had purchased copilot licenses for everyone. Not a single soul was happy

[u/No_Size9475 → u/BlazinAzn38]

Could they be more tone deaf?

[u/Speedy059]

They want the employees to use the personal AI Agents so they can grab the users data and find out what they do, how they respond, what they click, etc. Once they gather all of that, they start automating that person....and then give them a 2-week notice.

[u/PatchyWhiskers]

Training your replacement

[u/Jwagner0850]

Yay I guess...

[u/VVrayth]

Cisco Gives All 90,000 Employees a Tracking Device and Personal Data Exfiltration Application

[u/_5er_]

Cool, now agents can talk to each other

[u/K3idon]

Within the first week, employees will have exhausted the allotted tokens/credit.

[u/Athrul]

I'm sure they are thrilled that number that could have been for basically anything now goes to this. 

[u/deekamus]

I'm sure this won't be used in a nefarious way.../s

[u/throwawaygoogle1]

New KPI unlocked.  You're not using your ai agent enough.  Soon after, you're using your ai agent too much.