We live in a fast-paced world dominated by technology that delivers convenience and seamless user experiences at the tip of our fingers. The most obvious example of this is the adoption of virtual assistants and artificial intelligence, such as Alexa or Siri, in day-to-day tasks. Entire industries, from banking to retail to healthcare, are also acknowledging this fundamental shift in human behavior.
It’s been well overdue for networking to be added to that list. Today, Marvis, the Virtual Network Assistant (VNA) driven by Mist AI, takes the next step in the journey to the Self-Driving Network™ with its latest innovation, a conversational interface. This transforms the way IT teams interact and engage with their networks. Marvis delivers streamlined operations and simplified troubleshooting while boosting user experiences. The days of searching for answers by memorizing CLI and stitching UI dashboards together are quickly fading away.
To understand how Marvis came to be, let’s have a look at its evolution. While many vendors have boarded the AI hype train with fancy taglines and smokescreens, Mist AI has been hard at work since 2015. We started with a microservices cloud architecture designed from the ground up to optimize data ingestion. The data converts into AI primitives that builds out and evolves our data science toolbox (learn more in this blog). In 2018, the Mist AI engine was given a personality – Marvis VNA. And most recently, Marvis turned the Self-Driving Network™ from vision to reality with the Marvis Actions framework. Think of Marvis Actions as the “morning cup of coffee” view for visibility across several IT domains (WLAN, LAN, WAN and security) that automatically resolves issues or provides recommended actions for external systems. This brings us to today’s announcement and the next logical step with the Marvis conversational interface.
Introducing the Marvis Conversational Interface
At a high level, the Marvis conversational interface uniquely delivers:
- An interactive platform to engage with the Mist AI engine
- Better language understanding with advanced NLP
- The ability to take actions directly within the conversation
- Personalized experiences based on user feedback
- Integrated documentation and support
The Marvis conversational interface is now the one-stop-shop for IT administrators. It continues to build out its Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) so users can interact naturally with Marvis as if it were another team member.
The key piece to understand is that the conversational interface is not just a chatbot that returns basic answers – it understands and contextualizes a user’s general intent. The intent is processed by Mist AI to make broader data connections and anticipate the next string of actions, ultimately delivering improved value and quality of results. This helps IT administrators not only get the information they need, but also take the appropriate steps to troubleshoot and remediate through a simple conversation with the Mist AI engine.
We’re excited to share Marvis with enterprises as they embark on their journey toward the Self-Driving Network™. And even though the Mist AI engine has already been five years in the making, we’re really just getting started in transforming the IT user experience with streamlined operations in the network for the next decade.
Additional Resources:
- Blog: AI-Driven Enterprise 4.0: Unparalleled User Experiences from Client to Cloud
- Marvis product page
- Marvis datasheet
P.S. We’re not magicians. We’re also not AI washers. Take a look behind the scenes to see how AI gets real.
