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App Builder brings OpenAI Codex directly into Cisco Cloud Control, so customers and partners can build customized applications in natural language for their unique environments.

Cisco was OpenAI’s earliest design partner for Codex, an agentic platform that helps you build and ship with AI. Since then, our engineering teams have used it daily to accelerate our own product development, building the platform behind this announcement in just four months’ time. We are now bringing that same speed and capability set to our own customers and partners so they can build their own applications on top of the Cisco platform to customize it to their exact needs. Meet App Builder, where users can now use Codex directly inside of Cisco Cloud Control, powered by the Codex SDK.  

Build in plain language 

App Builder is simple to describe. Tell it what you want to be able to do in plain language, and it builds the application, lets you preview it, and ships it as a working app that runs directly inside Cisco Cloud Control Studio, the new part of Cisco Cloud Control built for customizing and extending the platform with applications and workflows. There is no infrastructure to provision, no build tools to install, and no plumbing to learn.

More than code 

Most AI coding tools stop at code generation. They hand you files and leave the hard part to you: getting something to run and reach people. App Builder is different. 

An application built here is “born deployed”. It is automatically authenticated with Cisco identity, registered, hosted, and ready to distribute the moment it is created. From a single description to a running, governed enterprise application, with nothing left to wire up. 

It also explains why building here is not the same as pointing a coding agent at the problem yourself. The agent is the engine. App Builder is everything Cisco puts around it. On its own, a coding agent produces code that knows nothing about Cisco’s identity, services, hosting, or how to make something run and distributable inside the platform. Inside App Builder, the agent has all of it from the start, so what comes out is not a project to finish. It is an app that works. 

What you can build 

The range is wide. Among the things customers and partners can build: 

  • Custom operational views. A network operations team builds one screen that brings the alerts, device health, and the few fix-it actions it reaches for during an outage into a single place, instead of clicking across separate consoles. 
  • Data and tools for the AI assistant. A team connects its own change-approval workflow to Cisco’s AI assistant, so an engineer can say “roll out this config change to the lab switches” and have the assistant route it for approval and apply it once it clears. 
  • Unified integrations. A team pulls a third-party data source into Cloud Control or pushes a Cisco signal out to an external system, instead of wiring up one-off connections by hand. 
  • Partner-built customer experiences. A partner builds a branded experience that runs directly in Cloud Control, extending Cisco’s platform to serve its own customers. 

Why it matters 

We built App Builder on a simple conviction: the distance between an idea and a working product should be measured in days, not quarters. That speed now belongs to the customers and partners who build on Cisco. 

Some products or features described may be in various stages of development and offered on a when-and-if available basis. 

Authors

Travis Sugarbaker

Principal Product Management Engineer

AI Software and Platform