Overview

The AI Assistant is a conversational AI interface designed to help optimize network management and promote troubleshooting. Through AI-powered responses, recommendations, and insights, the AI Assistant helps streamline network operations.

With its troubleshooting capabilities, the AI Assistant helps assist you with identifying and resolving network issues and contributes to minimal downtime and enhanced performance.
AI Assistant interface featuring buttons for Network Overview, Troubleshooting, Client & device insights, and Policies & Configuration, with a text input field at the bottom.

How do I access the AI Assistant?

The AI Assistant is a beta feature with controlled availability.

To use the AI Assistant, you must choose System > Settings > External Services > Cisco Catalyst Cloud. Use your cisco.com account credentials to register. Then, to launch the AI Assistant, click Launch in the Catalyst Center Sense banner or choose Help > Cisco DNA Sense.

For subsequent sessions, launch the AI Assistant via the icon in the top-right corner of the Catalyst Center UI.

Cisco Catalyst Center dashboard displaying system notifications and network health summaries, with an AI Assistant panel open on the right.

How can the AI Assistant help me?

The AI Assistant helps IT teams reduce management workload, increase productivity, and improve the end-user networking experience.

Start a conversation with the AI Assistant. To learn about its features, ask "What can you help me with?"

A chat interface showing the AI Assistant's response to the question "what can you do for me," listing capabilities such as troubleshooting, device lookups, health analysis, report generation, and automation guidance within Cisco Catalyst Center.

Primary use cases for the AI Assistant

The AI Assistant can help with these primary use cases:
  • monitoring
  • troubleshooting
  • documentation

Monitoring

Help accelerate issue resolution with data-driven guidance. The AI Assistant helps simplify root cause analysis and includes proposed next steps to help minimize downtime and reduce operational overhead.

Examples you can ask:

  • What are the security advisories affecting my device <device name>?
  • How is the performance of the clients associated with the access point?
  • Is my network compliant with Cisco's performance best practices?
  • Show me all the switches that rebooted today in this network.

Troubleshooting

Help accelerate issue resolution with data-driven guidance. The AI Assistant helps simplify root cause analysis and includes proposed next steps to help minimize downtime and reduce operational overhead.

Examples you can ask:

  • Show me all the association failures for access point <access point>.
  • Troubleshoot client <client name>.
  • What is the health of my wireless network at site <site name>?
  • Troubleshoot the authentication issue impacting wired client <client name>.

Documentation

Help streamline getting information related to documentation.

Examples you can ask:

  • Show me how to configure wireless profiles.
  • How do I push a configuration using CLI templates?
  • How do I onboard devices using PnP?
  • How do I upgrade images using SWIM?

Interact with the AI Assistant

Enter queries

  • Use clear and specific questions, such as “Show me the APs that are down” instead of “APs not working.”
  • Start a new thread for each session.

Provide feedback through the AI Assistant

Your feedback is essential in improving the AI Assistant. If you encounter an incorrect or incomplete response, or if you have ideas for new features, use the thumbs up or thumbs down icons after an interaction.

  • If an answer is incorrect, click thumbs down to provide feedback.
  • If the response is helpful, click thumbs up.

Provide details on why the response was incorrect or unhelpful. Include additional details, such as:

  • What you were trying to accomplish.
  • What you expected to happen.
  • Any issues or unexpected behavior.

Get support

If the AI Assistant is unresponsive or you are unable to provide in-product feedback by clicking thumbs up or thumbs down, open a support ticket.

FAQs

How accurate are the recommendations from the AI Assistant?

The AI Assistant is designed to provide suggestions by leveraging pretrained models tuned for networking-specific tasks, as well as integrating with real-time system data when applicable. The AI Assistant draws from networking industry best practices and product documentation to help generate responses. While the AI Assistant aims to provide grounded information, we recommend that you validate its suggestions and actions, especially for critical configurations or troubleshooting.

Is my data used to train the AI Assistant?

No, your data is not used to train the AI Assistant. Cisco handles your data responsibly. See the Cisco AI Assistant Offer Disclosure.

Does the AI Assistant require an advanced license?

The AI Assistant is available for all license tiers. However, the functionalities within the AI Assistant follow the tiers of the underlaying features it is leveraging.