Cisco builds AI in a box for the real world

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☕ Good morning,

The past few days have been a little chaotic here a series of unexpected power cuts turned our writing sessions into candle-lit brainstorming. It’s funny how silence feels different when your laptop’s dead. The outages threw our schedule off a bit, and a few editions had to take an unplanned pause.

But we’re back online, fully charged, and ready to dive in again.

_{—Here’s to the first sip.}

TODAY IN AI
Cisco launches unified edge for on-site AI

Cisco just launched something called Unified Edge, and it’s basically an all-in-one setup that brings AI straight to the edge places like retail stores, hospitals, and factories, where you don’t usually have big tech teams or fancy data centers.

Everything comes packed in one rack networking, storage, security, and monitoring tools, all built by Cisco. Then you can drop in whatever chips you want from Nvidia, Intel, or others to handle the AI work. It’s plug-and-play, so once it’s installed, everything can be monitored remotely by a central team.

The point is to let businesses run AI locally instead of relying on the cloud for everything, whether that’s cameras tracking inventory, machines detecting faults, or sensors analyzing data in real time.

Cisco says Verizon is already testing it, and it should be available everywhere by the end of the year.

Edge AI is still in its early days, but Cisco’s trying to make it simple, one clean, self-contained box that works, without cables everywhere or endless setup headaches.

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TECH BARISTA
Google’s AI Mode can now book your dinner

Google’s AI Mode in Search is getting smarter, it can now help you book dinner reservations just by describing what you want. You can say something like, “Find me a dinner reservation for three people this Friday after 6 p.m. near Logan Square, craving ramen or bibimbap,” and AI Mode will search across different reservation platforms to find real-time options that fit your preferences.

It’s a neat way to skip the usual back-and-forth of scrolling through apps. The AI pulls in details like party size, time, location, and cuisine, then gives you a curated list of restaurants you can book instantly.

Google says the goal is to make Search more useful and personalized while keeping results high-quality and safe. It’s still experimental, though, so it might mess up sometimes.

AI Mode first launched back in March as Google’s answer to ChatGPT Search and Perplexity AI, and it’s already available in 180+ countries. Google’s been adding new tools too, like a Canvas feature for creating study plans and organizing notes, and the ability to use Google Lens to ask about what’s on your screen.