Cisco takes inspiration from Iron Man for its AI-driven platform engineer

“We deliberately named it after Iron Man’s AI assistant because we wanted that level of capability – an intelligent system that understands context, can access different tools and knowledge bases, and most importantly, works alongside engineers rather than just responding to commands,” Kalpage said.

Platform engineering has hit a crisis point of complexity. The modern tech stack of Kubernetes, microservices, and cloud-native tools has created three critical pain points, Kalpage said, including: 

• The bottleneck problem: Engineers spend up to 70% of their time on repetitive tasks rather than innovation. JARVIS automates these workflows, turning day-long processes into minute-long ones. 
• The expertise gap: No human can master every component in today’s cloud stack. JARVIS bridges this gap by encoding platform knowledge and providing contextual assistance when engineers need it. 
• The integration nightmare: Most enterprises have dozens of disjointed tools. JARVIS creates a unified interface across these systems, orchestrating complex workflows that would normally require manual coordination across multiple platforms. 

Technically, JARVIS operates as a distributed brain with four interfaces, including a Backstage portal, Webex, JIRA, and CLI, meeting engineers in their existing workflows, Kalpage said. “Under the hood, it uses a LangGraph architecture with supervised, specialized, and reflection agents working together in feedback loops.” 

“It connects to knowledge bases, executes tool calls to various systems, and even generates Kubernetes configurations using hybrid ML approaches,” Kalpage said.

The JARVIS architecture aligns with Cisco Outshift’s Internet of Agents and recently announced AGNTCY (pronounced “agency”) initiative.

Outshift describes the Internet of Agents as standards-based, shared infrastructure components that enable quantum-safe, agent-to-agent communications. When AI agents begin to proliferate, a new, open structure will be needed so they can securely communicate and collaborate together to solve complex problems, Cisco stated.  The “Internet of Agents” is an open-sourced, three-layer architecture that would enable quantum-safe, agent-to-agent communication to allow AI agents to collaborate autonomously and share complex reasoning.