Cisco and OpenAI redefine enterprise engineering with Codex

For decades, Cisco has built and operated some of the world’s most complex, mission-critical software systems. As generative AI matured from experimentation to real operational capability, Cisco leaned into what it knows best: scaling advanced technology inside demanding, real-world environments.

That approach is already shaping how Cisco builds new products, including AI Defense, where Codex helped compress critical engineering work from several quarters to weeks.

Rather than treat Codex as a standalone developer tool, Cisco began integrating it directly into production engineering workflows, exposing it to massive multi-repository systems, C/C++-heavy codebases, and the security, compliance, and governance requirements of a global enterprise.

In the process, Cisco helped shape Codex into something fundamentally different from a developer productivity tool: an AI engineering teammate capable of operating at enterprise scale.

"I’ve loved discovering new opportunities to integrate Codex into Cisco's enterprise software lifecycle workflows. Collaborating with the OpenAI team to get Codex enterprise production ready has been rewarding as well."

—Ching Ho, a member of Cisco's engineering leadership

Building AI Defense with Codex

Cisco’s work on AI Defense shows what that model can look like in practice. AI Defense is Cisco’s end-to-end AI security solution that protects against safety and security risks introduced by AI.

Codex was used by Cisco’s team to write the majority of AI Defense and nearly every new feature that Cisco is building.

“Features that would have taken several quarters to get into customers’ hands dropped to weeks.”

—DJ Sampath, SVP/GM, AI Software and Platform, Cisco

Cisco also used Codex to help build their Defense Squad, an open-source tool that moved from ideation to the developer community in under one week.

Evaluating agentic AI in complex codebases

Using Codex for critical engineering workflows

—Ryan Brady, a Principal Engineer in Cisco's Splunk group