Cisco AI Defense

Interactive AI experiences are already transforming business

Advancements in natural language processing and generative AI have unlocked the next step in enterprise chatbot evolution. AI agents take these capabilities even further by interpreting instructions and acting autonomously on a user's behalf.

AI chatbot adoption has proven to be one of the most common and impactful enterprise applications for artificial intelligence. Prevalent examples include customer service and support, virtual helpdesks, and lead generation. While relatively new, AI agents are already demonstrating their value by helping users initiate purchases and returns, scheduling appointments, and automating various other workflows.

Interactive AI chatbots introduce new forms of business risk

Organizations that plan to leverage AI chatbot technology need to be aware that these technologies can introduce new safety and security risks. Not only can they misrepresent your business and share inaccurate information—at worst, they can distribute malicious content, share sensitive customer and business data, and perform unintended user actions.

While the architectures of AI chatbots and AI agents will vary, every component used in development is ultimately susceptible to malicious insertion or manipulation. Open source models, third-party libraries, training datasets, and connected knowledge bases can all be exploited to turn chatbots into distribution sources for misinformation, phishing links, malware, or arbitrary code execution.

Vulnerabilities in production AI chatbots can appear both inadvertently and through intentional exploitation. Factually inaccurate or harmful outputs can erode customer trust and create additional problems for customer support teams. Sensitive data used to fine tune or augment models can become a target for adversaries, who will engineer malicious prompts to extract valuable information on customers, models, and the broader business.

The dangers of AI agents can be particularly severe because they are authorized to act on a user's behalf in any connected service. An indirect prompt injection concealed in an email, for example, might contain discreet instructions to exfiltrate all mail from a target’s inbox.

Learn about the critical points where your chatbots and agents require security measures. Our vendor-agnostic Al Security Reference Architectures provide secure design patterns and practices for teams developing such GenAI applications.

Mitigate Al chatbot and Al agent risks with AI Defense

Effective mitigation of Al chatbot and Al agent risks requires validation at every step of the entire Al lifecycle. That includes verification of each component in the Al supply chain in development, and real-time examination of user inputs and model outputs in production. With a platform that includes model scanning, data scanning, and runtime guardrails. AI Defense ensures that your business can embrace Al chatbot technology safely and securely.

Prevent users and chatbots from relaying sensitive internal data

The relevance of chatbots is often improved by fine-tuning or augmenting models with internal data on the business and its customers. Maintaining the privacy and security of this data is absolutely imperative.

AI Defense Runtime Protection prevents sensitive data exposure by examining inputs for malicious prompts and validating that model outputs do not contain personally identifiable information (PIl). To avoid the burden of unnecessary sensitive data, AI Firewallour guardrails can entirely prevent users from providing PII to chatbots in the first place. 

Ensure responses are safe and reliable

The integrity of chatbot responses is critical for maintaining customer trust. This means not only ensuring answers are accurate, but also free from toxic or outright malicious content.

AI Defense Runtime Protection provides real-time validation that model responses are factually consistent and relevant to user queries. It also ensures that results are not harmful or biased in nature, upholding the integrity of your business and brand.

Combat high resource consumption and availability attacks

With prompts designed to overwhelm an AI system and maximize resource consumption, adversaries can drive up costs and degrade AI application availability for other users.

By monitoring inputs and outputs for excessive, repeated, or off-topic contents, the AI Defense Runtime Protection keeps chatbots aligned to their purpose and prevents bad actors from executing devastating Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.