Vendors across the world are saying very similar things about AI right now. It's been just two years since ChatGPT arrived on the scene, achieved record-breaking adoption and made everyone from copywriters to lawyers worry that their future job prospects were looking very dismal indeed.
For enterprises, those 24 months have been about experimentation, with GenAI making a relatively small splash compared to the consumer tsunami. Now, Cisco has joined IBM in predicting that global businesses are on the verge of turning their AI dabbling into actual deployment.
In its latest results, Cisco revealed it had earned $13.8 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2025, prompting a share price plunge even though the figure slotted into the higher end of its guidance range. Enterprise sales were up 33%, with web-scale customers placing AI infrastructure orders of more than $300 million, and Cisco is hoping to expand to a total of $1 billion in AI orders among this customer base.
On an earnings call, Chuck Robbins, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said Cisco has booked "further sales" with global enterprise customers who are "leveraging our technology platforms to modernize and automate their network operations to prepare for large-scale connectivity to AI applications".
"Most of the CIOs and technology leaders we talk to say that their organizations are planning full GenAI adoption within the next two years," he said. "Yet only 13% of organizations say their infrastructure is ready for AI today according to the Cisco AI Readiness Index."
He added: "Findings from our new global AI partner study show that IT partners around the world are anticipating a transformative wave of AI technology demand driven by infrastructure, cybersecurity, and customer experience, which they expect to fuel the majority of their revenue over the next four to five years."
"We see enterprise customers who - even when they're unsure about what AI applications they may deploy six, nine, 12 months from now - know that they need modern infrastructure to be prepared to do so, and we're seeing them forward invest to get ready for it," Robbins continued.
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Cisco is focused on three "big areas" around the imminent AI transformation. The first is the infrastructure needed in the back end of networks to let customers build training models.
The second is in the enterprise space. "We see upgrades and refresh opportunities for customers who are preparing for AI, and then we see the ability to work with them and their data centres with this simplistic deployment of AI applications that we're going to enable," the CEO said.
"And then the final area is continuing to work with the cloud providers and the enterprise customers on private data center and the front-end requirements that we see happening in the cloud side to support this AI transition as well."
Within the enterprise, Cisco customers have been focusing on customer experience.
"That's one of the big early applications that virtually every enterprise that we engage with is looking at," the CEO said.
Big businesses are also "building different applications" that contribute to automation and efficiency, including robotics or supply chain management.
To meet AI demand, Cisco is preparing to ship two new data centre products: an NVIDIA-based AI server and AI pods, which are infrastructure stacks tailored for specific AI use cases and industries. The AI server is expected to start shipping in December, and the AI Pods are already available to be ordered.
Hyperfabric, a fabric-as-a-service solution, is also expected to be available in early calendar 2025 and will "further simplify infrastructure deployment and management while providing real-time visibility into network performance", according to the CEO.
