Networks as the Nervous System of Physical AI

Welcome, Samuel.

Thanks very much for joining us today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Very nice to be here.

Okay, well, first thing we'll get into, as I'm understanding this, you're saying the network rather than the hardware is rapidly becoming the foundation of physical AI.

So if you would, if you could talk a little bit about that, for example, what changes when AI starts controlling machines instead of simply generating information?

Yeah, sure.

Thank you for asking.

So first, you know, what I would like to share is, look, Cisco has been an IT company for more than 40 years, and we are very well known for that.

We have been in the industrial network for more than 20 years.

And what we did two years ago is we wanted to get the state of industrial network.

what's happening, where are things going, and so on.

So in 2024, when we did the report, state of industrial network, and a significant portion of the people we asked told us that AI would change everything.

So guess what? Last year, we came back, and we did another survey, this time on the state of industrial AI, what's happening in AI industry.

So we asked more than 1,000 customers 350 of them were manufacturing leaders to share their view.

So what I'm going to share today is not Samuel's or Cisco's opinion, it's more what we've learned from a survey of 1,000 people working in industrial companies, 350 of them being in manufacturing.

So to go back to your question on what is changing and what are people doing, I think a majority of our customers have been, I would say, exploring with AI and are now deploying AI.

So what we've learned is 59% of manufacturer customers are deploying AI.

AI can come in different shapes and forms.

It can come from doing what we call device-level analytics, getting more data to be able to optimize the process, optimize the quality, or it can be use AI to control the machine.

It's more what we now call physical AI.

I, camera, see something, we take action, you act on the physical world.

No matter what you look at, the network is a key element of deploying AI into your industrial environment.

If it's about collecting data, the key things that people are going to be thinking of will be, okay, if I start to collect the data out of this machine, will it create bottlenecks somewhere else in my industrial environment? And unfortunately, sometimes it does, because the industrial networks have been not, I would say, upgraded to the level they should now.