1. Cisco
Why they’re here: With its strong roots in networking, Cisco has an established foothold in the enterprise — and a stranglehold on the data that networking gear generates. The acquisitions of Duo Security (multifactor authentication and zero trust), Thousand Eyes (visibility), and Splunk (AI-powered SIEM), have enabled Cisco to integrate networking and security capabilities. Cisco recently launched AI Assistant for Security, an interface trained on massive security datasets to help analysts with event triage, root cause analysis, policy design, and simplifying firewall management.
Power moves: Introduced “Foundation-sec-8b-reasoning,” an AI foundational model designed to apply AI-powered reasoning to security tasks such as threat modeling, attack vector analysis, risk assessment, and security architecture evaluation.
Outlook: John Grady, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, says, “The AI era demands a transformative approach to security. Organizations need distributed, identity-based, zero trust protection for applications, users, AI models, and agents, supported by a unified policy framework. Cisco is in a very unique position to support this with its ability to embed advanced protections directly into the network.”
