• Cisco's Innovation Arm and JARVIS: Cisco's Outshift has unveiled JARVIS, an AI-powered assistant designed to streamline platform-engineering workflows. It offers a conversational interface, integrates with over 40 tools, and can provision infrastructure, onboard applications, and retrieve documents using natural language.
• Development and Tools: JARVIS is developed by the platform-engineering team at Cisco. They communicate with it using tools like Jira, Webex, and Backstage. Assigning Jira tickets to JARVIS enables it to execute work.
• Significant Results: LangChain's blog post reported that tasks previously taking a week, like setting up CI/CD pipelines, can now be completed in under an hour. NetworkWorld blog post stated that engineers spend 70% of their time on repetitive tasks, and JARVIS automates these workflows, reducing process time.
• Hybrid AI Architecture: JARVIS is powered by a hybrid AI architecture combining multiple techniques. It uses large language models (LLMs) based on LangGraph for natural-language processing. It has three safeguards - rule-based validation, repeatable workflows, and agent supervision - to ensure accuracy and reliability.
• Knowledge Answering: JARVIS uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to supplement its in-memory knowledge by looking up information from external sources like wikis and codebases.
• Current and Future Plans: Currently, JARVIS is used only internally at Cisco. The company plans to open-source key components like its integration with Backstage and standalone agents. It is also contributing to the Internet of Agents initiative.
• Bill Gates' View: Bill Gates sees AI agents like JARVIS as a part of the future and believes they will change how people interact with computers and revolutionize the software industry.