NEWS
Cisco outlines three foundations for enterprise AI at scale
As organisations seek to move beyond isolated AI pilots and deliver measurable business outcomes, the focus is shifting towards embedding AI securely and effectively across everyday operations.
According to the 2025 Cisco AI Readiness Index, only 33 % of organisations have a formal plan to guide employees through AI adoption. Drawing on its own experience, Cisco has identified three principles for operationalising AI at scale: trusted enterprise data, secure platforms and AI-native workflows.
The first is building AI on trusted enterprise data. With business information distributed across applications, warehouses, documents and legacy systems, AI requires secure access to relevant data and sufficient context to generate useful results.
Cisco also highlighted the importance of providing employees with secure alternatives to shadow AI. The company developed an internal, responsibly governed and model-agnostic AI platform designed to allow employees to work securely with enterprise data while accessing appropriate models for different tasks.
The third principle is redesigning entire workflows rather than simply using AI to improve individual tasks. Cisco said more than
21,000 of its engineers now use AI coding tools, saving an average of six hours per week. Across the wider business, employees are saving an average of five hours.
As AI evolves from answering questions to completing work, Cisco said trusted data, secure access, enterprise context and clear governance will become increasingly important. The objective is not maximum autonomy, but the appropriate level of autonomy for each task.
Microsoft and HUMAIN announce long-term AI collaboration in Saudi Arabia
HUMAIN, a PIF company delivering full-stack Artificial Intelligence capabilities globally, has announced the first milestone in a long-term strategic collaboration with Microsoft.
The collaboration will initially focus on bringing HUMAIN’ s ALLAM models to Microsoft’ s AI ecosystem and combining HUMAIN’ s AI expertise with Microsoft’ s Forward Deployed Engineers( FDEs).
The teams will work directly with organisations to identify, develop and deploy high-value AI solutions across Microsoft technologies.
The collaboration builds on Microsoft’ s AI platforms, including Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Foundry, alongside HUMAIN’ s capabilities in Arabiclanguage models and AI applications. The companies will initially focus on accelerating AI adoption through Arabic-language capabilities and hands-on engineering support, while exploring opportunities to expand the collaboration over time.
The companies intend to make ALLAM available through Microsoft Foundry, giving developers and enterprises access to HUMAIN’ s Arabiclanguage models within Microsoft’ s AI ecosystem. Organisations could use the models to build, customise and deploy AI applications and agents designed to address Arabic-language and regional business requirements.
As part of the collaboration, HUMAIN’ s AI experts and Microsoft’ s Forward Deployed Engineers will work alongside Microsoft teams and customers across its AI ecosystem. Their role will extend beyond ALLAM, providing hands-on engineering support to organisations implementing AI solutions across a range of Microsoft technologies and customer environments.
Working directly with customer teams, the engineers will help identify highvalue use cases, integrate AI into existing workflows, configure and optimise deployments and support the transition from experimentation to mission-critical, production-scale implementation. www. intelligentcio. com
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