Cisco's AI push started with a small group of true believers

When Cisco started working on a unified analytics platform, the company was more concerned with finding the right people to do the work than the data they were using, Cisco's vice president of strategy Rajat Mishra said at the VB Summit in Berkeley, California today. "I wish I could tell you we had a very analytical approach to this problem," he said in an onstage interview. "The truth is much messier." The management approach Cisco took nicely mirrors one method of training a machine learning algorithm: Start with a small data set, then add more data. "Instead of focusing on data, we actually focused on the people," Mishra said.