Machine learning (ML) has been one of the hottest buzzwords in technology over the past few years. It seems every segment of the high-tech industry has been impacted by ML. This technology has changed the way we service customers, allowed us to interact with in-room meeting devices, made our businesses more secure and enabled data scientists to better predict business outcomes. Heck, we even have ML-based agents in our homes that can help us play songs, turn on lights and order paper towels. However, one market that has yet to benefit from ML is the services industry. There have been changes in the way customers pay for services; the range of services is certainly broader, but they are fundamentally the same as they were a decade ago-at least until now.

Last week, Cisco announced several updates to its Business Critical Services (BCS) that can transform a customer's IT platform-including engineering, technical strategy and operations. It does this by delivering capabilities in the areas of design, recommendations, architecture, analytics, automation and security. The best part is the services can be consumed on an