Moving quickly to accelerate artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in your organization has the potential to serve as a stepping function to revolutionize your business. Since the expansion and breadth of access to generative AI (GenAI), 97% of companies have reported an increased urgency to deploy AI-powered technology. However, only 14% of organizations worldwide are fully ready to integrate AI into their business, according to the Cisco AI Readiness Index. This furthers the need to find a trusted advisor who can help you navigate the complexities associated with GenAI adoption.
According to Maribel Lopez, Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research: “Navigating through the complex world of Generative AI requires integrating and managing multiple Large Language Models, data sources, policy controls, and user access without impeding innovation and increasing risks. Organizations need a full-stack technology approach to GenAI with building blocks that streamline and accelerate the design, delivery and governance of AI-enabled applications while reducing compliance risks.”
Today at Cisco Live Las Vegas, we are pleased to announce two major milestones as part of Cisco’s commitment to help accelerate the reliable delivery of new GenAI solutions.
Extended Availability of Motific
The first milestone in our announcement is the broader availability of Motific for free trial usage for all customers and for production usage for a limited set of customers. Additionally, we are targeting Motific general availability for production usage by July 31, 2024.
“The launch marks the introduction of Cisco’s first product that navigates the complexities of generative AI deployment. And the timing could not have been better. Enterprises across sectors are bullish on the potential of generative AI and are bringing the technology into their internal and customer-facing applications.”
—Venture Beat
First announced earlier this year at Cisco Live EMEA, Motific is a new SaaS product for rapid and trusted delivery of GenAI applications in organizations. Motific empowers central IT and business function teams to quickly provision GenAI assistants and applications, while improving compliance with their organization’s trust, security, and cost policies. Motific also helps you understand user insights and ROI benefits.
“A product like Motific that analyzes user model interactions to quantify the time savings as users’ leverage GenAI can help organizations get a better handle on the ROI. Further, Motific’s what-if model suitability analysis can help organizations compare, contrast, and select the most cost-effective models for the actual GenAI powered tasks their users are performing.”
—Ritu Jyoti, GM/GVP AI, Automation, Data and Analytics Market Research and Advisory Services, IDC
The development and release of Motific was made possible through Outshift, Cisco’s incubation engine. Outshift drives what’s next and new for Cisco, including researching emerging technologies that target new markets and personas and building meaningful products and solutions for our customers. This brings the best of new ventures, combined with the scale, resources, and leadership of Cisco. With Outshift, Cisco brings the unique innovation required to simplify and accelerate GenAI deployments.
Collaborating with Mistral AI
The second milestone is Cisco’s announced plan to collaborate with Mistral AI, a recognized leader in GenAI as a large language model (LLM) provider.
“We are pleased to launch this collaboration with Cisco, which will bring new opportunities for GenAI assistants through Motific. We are looking forward to see our models enhancing innovation and optimizing operations for Cisco’s clients, all while ensuring compliance with their organization’s trust, security, and cost policies.”
—Arthur Mensch, CEO and Co-Founder, Mistral AI
When selecting the first LLM provider to work with, we aligned our efforts with a provider who values developing open, efficient, and trustworthy models. Mistral AI, a global company headquartered in Paris specializing in generative artificial intelligence, brings a strong focus on privacy and security and also bolsters our ability to provide diverse options to our global customer base. Today, we’re also announcing the first integration between Mistral AI and Motific.
Motific makes it easy for customers to select Mistral AI’s model within Motific to build their GenAI assistants and applications. Mistral AI is available as a model provider connection in the Motific free trial and as a pre-connected model provider in the Motific sandbox as part of the June 2, 2024 release. With a few clicks, organizations with Mistral AI relationships can quickly leverage their models in Motific to power their custom GenAI assistants and applications.
As we look to the future, we plan to leverage Mistral AI technology across the Cisco portfolio. Outshift is exploring expanding its collaboration with Mistral AI including:
- Powering Motific guardrails, intelligence, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities using Mistral AI GenAI models.
- Building new domain- and task-specific models for new Outshift products and features.
Building AI with a Foundation of Trust
Together, Cisco and Mistral AI offer powerful ways for organizations across the world to deploy GenAI. This reinforces Cisco’s commitment to being a platform agnostic, global AI player for our customers, who are increasingly feeling the pressure and complexity of advancing their AI initiatives.
These shared values anchor our ability to jointly help our customers to build Gen AI more rapidly, with a foundation of trust, by:
Delivering diverse AI solutions
We are committed to being a multi-model player in AI, offering options and coverage for our global customer base.
Committing to trustworthy AI
We are committed to responsible AI principles. As we work with Mistral AI, we will develop offers that help customers deliver more trustworthy solutions.
Driving efficiency and sustainability
Cisco is committed to helping customers advance their sustainability goals to improve energy and resource efficiency. With the power of Mistral AI, we will be able to focus on delivering optimized and more efficient models.
See Motific at Cisco Live!
We hope that you find the opportunity to visit Outshift at Cisco Live!
in Las Vegas to meet our leadership team and other AI enthusiasts.
We will also be at AWS re:Inforce 2024 – June 10-12, Philadelphia, PA.
Additional Resources
If you would like to learn more about Cisco’s AI strategy, Motific, and our collaboration with Mistral AI, visit these resources:
Check out Motific.ai
Sign up for Outshift’s newsletter, The Shift
Learn more about Cisco AI Solutions
Take the Cisco AI Readiness Assessment
You said, “This reinforces Cisco’s commitment to being a platform agnostic, global AI player for our customers, who are increasingly feeling the pressure and complexity of advancing their AI initiatives.”
Based on empirical research, we already know that a successful Generative AI (GenAI) adoption requires more emphasis on employee skills development. Few enterprise employees currently have access to adequate GenAI training and coaching resources. And skills are a known gating factor for AI success.