As the world undergoes a transformative era of artificial intelligence innovation, organisations face a pivotal choice: embrace AI as a competitive differentiator or risk falling into irrelevance. For those who adopt AI, the future workforce will not just consist of humans but will expand exponentially to include a variety of AI entities—apps, agents, robots, and humanoids—working alongside humans to orchestrate complex workflows. The potential is staggering: amplifying human capacity to unprecedented levels and unlocking massive gains in productivity. However, this transition introduces unique challenges. AI, by its very nature, operates differently from traditional systems. The addition of AI models to enterprise architectures brings unpredictability, vulnerability, and complexity. This necessitates a paradigm shift in how organisations think about safety and security in their AI ecosystems. ### **The Risks of AI Adoption** AI systems introduce new layers of risk. Models, unlike deterministic applications, can exhibit unpredictable behaviour, and when these fail, the consequences can be severe. Issues such as bias, toxicity, and inappropriate outputs may emerge, compounded by external threats exploiting vulnerabilities to compromise data or systems. In a world where enterprises utilise multiple models across public and private clouds, fragmented safeguards from vendors are no longer sufficient. To truly innovate fearlessly with AI, organisations require a common layer of visibility and control—one that continuously validates AI usage and enforces guardrails to ensure safe and secure operations across the enterprise. ### **Introducing AI Defense** AI Defense reimagines safety and security for the AI-driven future. Designed to empower organisations to innovate without compromising safety, this solution addresses two critical areas: 1. **Accessing AI Applications:** Third-party AI applications hold transformative potential but come with risks such as data leakage and malicious activities. AI Defense enables organisations to gain full visibility into app usage and enforce AI-specific policies, leveraging existing security frameworks augmented with advanced protections. 2. **Building and Running AI Applications:** AI Defense ensures the integrity of AI models by continuously discovering, validating, and protecting them. It identifies vulnerabilities, applies real-time guardrails, and scales security across public and private cloud environments. ### **Game-Changing Innovations** AI Defense stands on two core innovations: **continuous validation at scale** and **protection at scale.** - **Continuous Validation:** AI Defense employs an algorithmic red-teaming capability to rigorously test models for vulnerabilities, bias, and other issues. Automated systems rapidly simulate trillions of attack scenarios, recommending guardrails for continuous improvement. This ensures that AI remains resilient, even as threats evolve. - **Protection at Scale:** Leveraging Cisco’s distributed enforcement capabilities, AI Defense integrates AI protections directly into the network, infrastructure, and edge devices. This hyper-distributed approach provides unmatched visibility and seamless control across an organisation’s AI footprint—without hindering developers or innovation. ### **Unlocking the Potential of AI, Securely** AI Defense enables organisations to move fast while maintaining robust safety and security protocols. By integrating purpose-built technologies, proprietary intelligence, and seamless developer-friendly tools, it offers a powerful framework for unlocking AI’s potential. In the race to lead in AI, safety and security are no longer optional—they are foundational. AI Defense ensures that organisations can embrace AI’s transformative possibilities boldly, securely, and responsibly.