Cisco Reaches 90% AI Adoption with Secure Internal Platform

Cisco Reaches 90% AI Adoption with Secure Internal Platform

Cisco has achieved 90% employee adoption of artificial intelligence by building its own secure platform rather than blocking consumer AI tools or running disconnected pilots. The company's Circuit platform now serves more than 100,000 users and has become the foundation for how Cisco operationalizes AI across its business.

The approach addresses a gap identified in Cisco's own 2025 AI Readiness Index, which found that only 33% of organizations have formal plans to guide employees through AI adoption. Instead of layering AI onto legacy systems, Cisco redesigned how work gets done around what AI makes possible.

Why it matters

Most enterprises are still experimenting with AI in isolated pockets while employees turn to unsecured consumer tools. Cisco's experience demonstrates that providing a secure, compelling alternative—rather than imposing restrictions—can drive organization-wide adoption and measurable productivity gains without creating governance risks.

Three Principles for Enterprise AI

Cisco's strategy centered on connecting AI to trusted data, building a secure unified platform, and redesigning workflows to be AI-native rather than simply automating existing steps.

The company invested in bringing enterprise data together across applications, warehouses, and legacy systems, building the semantic understanding needed for AI to reason across business contexts. This foundation allows employees to trust the answers AI provides because the models can securely access relevant information.

When generative AI emerged, Cisco recognized that attempting to block employee experimentation would fail. Instead, the company built Circuit as a secure alternative to consumer AI tools. The platform gives employees access to multiple AI models through a single interface, connects to enterprise data, and allows teams to build and share prompts, connectors, and agents—all within a governed environment aligned with Cisco's Responsible AI Principles.

Three design principles shaped Circuit: it had to be secure enough for enterprise data, compelling enough to offer the right model for each task, and extensible enough for employees to build reusable capabilities. This approach drove adoption without mandates or usage targets.

Measurable Productivity Gains

More than 21,000 Cisco engineers now use AI coding tools, with over 80% using them weekly. These engineers save an average of six hours per week, while employees across the broader business save an average of five hours weekly.

Beyond time savings, AI has reduced friction by minimizing time spent searching for information and switching between systems. Employees now use AI daily to summarize information, analyze documents, search internal knowledge, generate content, and automate routine work.

Moving Toward Agentic AI

Cisco's next phase involves agentic AI—systems that complete work rather than simply answering questions. The company emphasizes that agents need trusted data, secure access, enterprise context, and clear governance. The goal is the right level of autonomy for each task, not maximum autonomy.

The company acknowledges its approach will continue evolving with the technology. But Cisco's experience suggests that organizations creating the most value from AI won't necessarily be first adopters—they'll be those that operationalize it most effectively.

These details were first reported by Cisco in a blog post on its Executive Platform.