Cisco has announced a major milestone in its security roadmap, with Cisco Identity Intelligence becoming the first Cisco product powered end to end by a Cisco-built artificial intelligence model. As organisations across the Middle East accelerate digital transformation and digital government initiatives, this advancement strengthens identity security as a foundation for trust and resilience.
Strengthening identity security with clearer insight
Cisco Identity Intelligence helps organisations detect and respond to identity-related risk across their environment. Continuous monitoring of identity activity, it gives administrators visibility into who is logging in, from where, and on which device. Using post authentication signals, it can surface suspicious behaviour that traditional controls may miss, such as unusual locations, abnormal privilege use, and signs of MFA fatigue or session hijacking, helping security teams act before threats escalate. With cyber threats becoming increasingly identity-driven, this level of visibility is essential for organisations looking to stay ahead of risk.
A key part of the experience is the weekly email digest sent to administrators. It summarises the most important identity events and trends in a clear, actionable format, highlighting anomalies and opportunities to improve identity hygiene. With more than two thousand customers relying on it each week, the digest has become a consistent touchpoint for staying on top of identity risk.
To deliver a high-quality digest, Cisco Identity Intelligence uses the Cisco Foundation AI model, which is tuned for security and identity use cases. This helps produce summaries that are clearer, more accurate and better aligned with real security workflows, without relying on general purpose external models.
Fady Younes, Managing Director for Cybersecurity at Cisco Middle East, Africa, Türkiye, Romania and CIS, commented: “Security teams don’t need more noise, they need clearer, more usable signals. By deploying a Cisco-built AI model, we are delivering more actionable identity insights that help teams move faster and with greater confidence. This is especially important as organisations in the Middle East continue scaling cloud and digital services while working to maintain trust and resilience.”
What customers will notice
Customers will not need to change how they use the product. The digest becomes clearer and more consistent, prioritisation improves, and recommendations are expressed in a more actionable way. The result is sharper identity insights that help security teams make quicker and more confident decisions.
Why Cisco’s security-tuned AI model matters
Foundation sec 1.1 8B Instruct is trained specifically on cybersecurity and identity scenarios, enabling output that better matches how SOC analysts and identity administrators assess risk. Using a Cisco-built model also strengthens control over quality and supports enterprise requirements around security and compliance. This aligns closely with regional priorities around data governance, digital sovereignty, and the protection of critical sectors such as government, financial services, and energy across the Middle East.
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