Cisco IQ hit general availability this week in SaaS mode. The product consolidates asset inventory, configuration data, TAC history, and contract records into a single environment-aware layer, then runs agentic AI across it to surface ranked risks before they cause outages.

The problem it's addressing is documented in Cisco's own Talos research: 40% of top-targeted vulnerabilities last year hit end-of-life devices, 32% of which are over a decade old. Most of those environments aren't unmanaged, they're just fragmented across systems nobody reconciles in real time.

The goal of the product is to solve the asset intelligence problem for large Cisco shops. Asset state, CMDB entries, and live telemetry have historically lived in separate tools. Cisco IQ builds a continuous data fabric across those sources, then applies agentic AI to diagnose and prioritize against that unified picture. The "AI surfaces, humans decide" framing addresses a real concern in enterprise IT: agentic systems making unsanctioned changes to production infrastructure.

On-prem and air-gapped deployment options extend that coverage to regulated environments where the stakes are highest.

Cisco IQ is already included for existing Support and Professional Services customers, so there's no separate budget line.

Peer benchmarking, showing how your environment's posture compares against similar organizations by size and sector, comes in July. That feature is likely what moves the conversation from an IT operational tool to something with executive visibility.

About 90 customers participated in the early access.

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