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  "path": "/article/4166294/cisco-nerds-out-may-the-fourth-be-with-your-ai-assistant.html",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-04T13:09:56.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.networkworld.com",
  "tags": [
    "Aerospace and Defense Industry, Artificial Intelligence, Industry, Manufacturing Industry, Markets, Networking, Technology Industry",
    "May the Fourth Be With You",
    "AI Assistant",
    "Down, the network is. Check the logs, you must.",
    "Aruna Ravichandran",
    "Deep Network Model",
    "blog",
    "blog about the release",
    "Revenge of the Fifth"
  ],
  "textContent": "Your local Cisco AI Assistant just got a little Jedi training.\n\nCisco is looking to make the most of the unofficial Star Wars Day with a May the Fourth Be With You release of what it calls Galaxy Mode for its AI Assistant, which, on this planet anyway, is aimed at helping IT teams operate, troubleshoot, and secure their networks more efficiently with as little laser blaster use as possible.\n\nSpecifically, Galaxy Mode is a new release of AI Assistant for Meraki or Thousand Eyes customers that is only available until June 4. Other new features will be available after that date, but Galaxy Mode will not.\n\nGalaxy Mode brings the Star Wars treatment to the logon screens of Meraki and Thousand Eyes management products. Starfield flows behind the initial prompt, echoing the beginning of all Star Wars movies. And then there’s the voice: “Down, the network is. Check the logs, you must.”\n\nAfter that, there are a number of concealed Easter Eggs that Cisco execs say will brighten your Star Wars Day as well as solve some real issues. “Hidden, the surprises are. Find them, you must,” Cisco stated.\n\nOne of the more important new features is support for what Cisco calls Deep Reasoning. While current AI assistants can monitor events in the network, Deep Reasoning interprets them and can bring rapid AI analysis for security audits and planning tasks, Aruna Ravichandran, senior vice president & CMO, AI, Networking, Collaboration for Cisco, told _Network World_.\n\nDeep Reasoning, which is still in beta, lets the AI Assistant quickly analyze network security compliance, providing insights and recommendations as well as expediting responses to emerging threats, Ravichandran said.\n\nCisco previewed some capabilities of Deep Reasoning in conjunction with its Deep Network Model announcement in June 2025, saying it could help analyze network diagnostics and examine problem symptoms to provide insight that might be missed by human eyes. “Although generative AI is still a young technology that can make mistakes, expert-level IT professionals are well-equipped to evaluate the output for accuracy and detect hallucinations,” Cisco wrote in a blog last year.\n\n“Deep Reasoning tracks signals across domains the way a veteran engineer does, sensing how a misconfigured policy in one corner sends ripples three hops away, watching for the cascade before it cascades. And it shows its work—the chain of reasoning is visible, so your team can see why it reached the conclusion it did. It senses the disturbance before the disturbance becomes a war room,” Cisco executives said in a preview of the Galaxy release.\n\nAnother feature helps users automatically generate agentic workflows. Agentic Workflows is a cross-domain, low-code/no-code automation tool built directly into the Meraki Dashboard, according to Ravichandran.\n\n“Starting today, you can now describe what you want to the AI Assistant the way you would describe it to a colleague at a whiteboard. The system listens, drafts a plan, hands it back for your approval, and then builds the workflow for you, executable within the AI Assistant. Auditable, deterministic, reusable, and yours to refine. Use the words, build the thing. Intent becomes execution. Automatically,” Cisco stated.\n\n“Customers can simply ask AI Assistant, ‘Can you generate workflow to expand the DHCP pool for my network?’ Agentic workflows are something we’ve had for a while, but now all of this is accessible through AI Assistant. And each time we keep adding more and more capability to the system, one of the things we’ve really heard from our customers is, ‘How can I create workflows for myself? How can I use it to contextualize what’s my environment?’ So this is something that people have been asking for and we’re excited to showcase,” Ravichandran said.\n\nThe last two features available in Galaxy Mode make spotting and fixing network problems easier.\n\n“Picture the long arc from ‘something is wrong’ to ‘something is fixed’ collapsing into a single conversation. No tab graveyards. No copy-pasting MAC addresses between tools. The path from alert to resolution travels through one window, with the AI Assistant walking beside you—pointing, narrating, suggesting, and when you give the nod, executing. Your co-pilot has the star map memorized,” Ravichandran wrote in a blog about the release.\n\nFeatures such as AI RRM, packet capture, packet analysis, and config recommendations “have been quietly powerful inside the platform—but for a lot of teams, they have been buried one menu too deep to find on a busy Wednesday. AI Assistant pulls them up to eye level—all activated by simply asking the Assistant,” Ravichandran wrote. “Hidden firepower, finally in the open.”\n\nUpcoming announcements from Cisco Live will expand these features further, according to Cisco.\n\nNow let’s just hope there’s no **Revenge of the Fifth**.",
  "title": "Cisco nerds out: May the Fourth be with your AI assistant"
}