The Fundamentals of AI: Making AI Practical
Cisco, Friday, July 10th, 2026
The final part of Cisco's AI series covers the engineering techniques that turn research models into deployable products.
This is the final installment in Cisco's three-part series on AI fundamentals, focused on the practical engineering that transforms research models into deployable products.
It covers fine-tuning strategies, parameter-efficient adaptation methods like LoRA, retrieval-augmented generation to reduce hallucinations, and model distillation for resource-constrained devices.
The author argues that engineering ingenuity matters as much as architectural innovation, highlighting the infrastructure challenges that separate lab AI from production systems.