Enterprise AI agents are no longer experimental. Organizations are deploying agents inside ServiceNow, Microsoft 365, and other SaaS platforms to handle everything from IT support tickets to financial workflows. These agents access sensitive data, take real actions, and interact with employees and customers every day.
Security teams face a difficult question: how do you protect an AI agent you did not build, running inside an application you do not control?
Until now, organizations could apply guardrails to the AI applications they built themselves. But the SaaS AI agents spreading across their environments operated outside that security perimeter. That gap is closing.
We’re excited to announce the integration between Cisco AI Defense and AppOmni that brings full runtime guardrails to SaaS AI agents. Joint customers can now protect agents running in platforms like Microsoft 365 Copilot and ServiceNow Now Assist with the same guardrails they use for every other AI agent in their environment.
How AI Defense and AppOmni Integration Works
AppOmni AgentGuard acts as a real-time intercept layer inside SaaS environments. It monitors AI agent interactions across chat, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and agent-to-agent communication channels. When an interaction occurs, AgentGuard routes the payload to the AppOmni cloud analysis engine, which calls Cisco AI Defense for guardrail evaluation. AI Defense applies the configured policies and returns an enforcement verdict: allow, block, or terminate.
The result is real-time protection against safety, security, and privacy attacks including prompt injection, tool exploitation, sensitive data exfiltration, and harmful content—all enforced before the SaaS agent can act. These are continuously informed by threat intelligence from Cisco’s AI security research team, which means protections evolve as new techniques emerge.
With our newly-announced Policy Studio, AI Defense guardrails are more powerful and personal than ever before. Security teams can define custom guardrails that protect against threats specific to their agents, their industries, and their use cases. A financial services firm can create guardrails that prevent an agent from disclosing portfolio allocation strategies. A healthcare organization can build protections specific to how their agents handle patient data. These are not generic rules. They are guardrails shaped by the context of your business.
And because this integration brings the full Cisco AI Defense policy engine to AppOmni, customers get a uniform policy across every agent in their environment. The guardrails protecting your internally built agents are the same guardrails protecting your SaaS agents. One policy, configured once, enforced everywhere.
Agentic Security Designed for Security Leaders
The integration solves a simple but critical problem: SaaS AI agents should not be a security exception.
Before this, security teams had two choices. Apply generic, out-of-the-box protections to SaaS agents and hope they cover your specific risks or accept a gap between the tailored policies protecting your first-party agents and the limited controls available for your SaaS agents.
Now, the custom guardrails you authored for your specific threats apply to your SaaS agents too. Your ServiceNow Now Assist agents get the same protection as your internally built agents. Your Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions are subject to the same policies. No separate tool. No separate configuration. One policy, enforced uniformly, regardless of where the agent runs.
Get Started
The Cisco AI Defense and AppOmni integration is available to joint customers today. To learn how your organization can extend AI Defense guardrails into your SaaS AI agents, reach out to the Cisco sales team or visit the Cisco AI Defense product page.
