CIO wants to grow tech team by cloning staff as digital twins and AI agents

Cisco Live Experienced IT professionals should share their experience so their employers can create digital twins and AI agents that do parts of their own jobs, to relieve them of repetitive work and after-hours troubleshooting chores.

That's the opinion of Dr. Vince Kellen, Chief Information Officer at the University of California San Diego, as he articulated during a keynote address at the Cisco Live conference on Tuesday.

Kellen said the higher education sector faces declining student numbers and other funding pressures. He also likened his own University to a small city as 100,000 to 150,000 people visit it each day, and it therefore operates substantial tech infrastructure.

"All roads are leading to high levels of automation whenever we can," he said.

The University also has unique security challenges brought on by work at its Oceanography Institute.

"I've learned that when you put sonar in the water, you discover more than fish, and other countries want to know about that," Kellen said. "In the last year or so we have seen some very exquisite attacks coming out of foreign actors that are pretty well financed." These attackers also run long-duration campaigns.

The CIO said automation of defenses against everyday attacks is therefore necessary to free resources to combat "exquisite" attacks

Agentic AI therefore appeals, Kellen said, because it has the potential to allow proactive detection of issues with technical infrastructure so his tech team can address them before they impact services.

"It is also setting the scene for great productivity, perhaps adding humans as agents and a digital twin of that human within an agentic framework so the knowledge and the expertise we have can get into the AI and relieve them of some of the burden of constantly replaying their history back to us."

"We have all this knowledge in human beings around network policy that we have to get out of their minds in a kind of drip irrigation fashion," he added. "We need to bring it into the AI to improve its performance over time based on this human/technical symbiosis."

Kellen thinks extracting and digitizing that experience will improve AI's ability to manage and secure networks more quickly than training new models.

He also thinks it will improve quality of life for IT pros, because if they're asked to solve an incident, capturing their knowledge and approach will mean AI can replicate it next time a similar problem strikes.

"Then that person doesn't have to be tortured when there's another incident. They don't get called the next time."

Over to you, dear readers: Will you allow your employer to digitally clone you if it means less scutwork and fewer after-hours callouts? The comments section is down there. ®