That mindset led Cisco to begin working closely with OpenAI around Codex, helping define what enterprise-grade AI for software engineering should look like in practice—and how Codex could be applied to real, large-scale engineering work inside complex production environments.

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.

Cisco already runs a mature engineering organization with multiple AI initiatives in flight. What made Codex compelling wasn’t code completion or surface-level automation, but agency. Codex demonstrated the ability to: