Cisco made a swath of announcements at RSAC 2025 Conference. Unsurprisingly, several of them had something to do with AI, specifically about AI security. We sat down with Cisco’s Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel to have a conversation about where he and Cisco thinks things are going.
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When we spoke to Patel last year, he was quite optimistic. The use of AI in security solutions was going to mean that the defenders would, at least temporarily, get the upper hand.
Between last year and now, a lot has happened, especially in the field of AI. The big question now is how to secure the use of AI in organizations. That’s what many of the companies at RSAC Conference focused on this year. With the agentic wave of AI upon is, and new things like Agent-to-Agent and the MCP protocol that come with it, this is a very important challenge to tackle.
To us, two things stood out in Cisco’s announcements this week. One was the deepening of the partnership with ServiceNow, with an integration between Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow SecOps. The other was the launch of Foundation AI and an open-source AI security model. Patel frames the latter innovation as follows: “You don’t go to your dentist for heart surgery. Domain knowledge matters in AI and models.”
Apart from the topics above, we also discuss the agentic future of security itself. This is important, because that enables defenders to elevate security from human to machine scale. That is especially important when facing machine-scale attacks. As Patel notes, “The models are going to get smarter… and as they get smarter, you’ll find a tremendous amount of autonomy injected into workflows.”
This and much more in this latest episode of Techzine Talks on Tour.
Patel’s RSAC 2025 Conference keynote is available on YouTube. If his comments he made during the conversation we had with him about that keynote made you curious, it is available on YouTube, via this link.
Techzine Talks on Tour: season two
We started Techzine Talks on Tour in May of 2024, with the goal of doing at least one episode every two weeks. After 25 episodes in 2024 we were close enough to that target for us to call the first season a good start. That’s what it is, a start, because we’re not done yet. We continue with a second season, with the goal of growing our reach even further. We will once again try and serve up a fresh new episode of Techzine Talks every two weeks or faster.
A big thank you to the people who found us in 2024 already. We hope you continue to listen to Techzine Talks on Tour in 2025. If this is your first encounter with our podcast, there’s much more to come! We hope you enjoy this episode.
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Techzine Talks on Tour is available on all the well-known platforms. So you can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube for example. Just search for Techzine Talks on Tour in your favorite podcast app.
Previous episodes of Techzine Talks on Tour:
- Humans aren’t the weakest link, they’re a critical security layer
- Three decades of Check Point (and cybersecurity): a conversation with Gil Shwed
- MuleSoft meets AI: Powering the Agentforce revolution
- AI without ethics will never truly serve humanity
- Cisco wants a (big) piece of the AI pie and doubles down on compute
Get in touch
We hope you like this new podcast series. If so, please let us know. If you have suggestions on how we can improve, we would like to hear those too. We’re also open to suggestions around specific topics, or specific people that want to appear in an episode of Techzine Talks on Tour. You can find both Coen van Eenbergen and Sander Almekinders on LinkedIn, or you can send an email to info@techzine.eu.
Also check out our Techzine Insight on RSAC 2025 Conference, where we present all of the news, background stories and podcasts we produced.