Cisco’s Jeetu Patel On Why AI Fluency Will Soon Be Non Optional

Jeetu Patel has a front-row seat to one of the largest technology transformations in history. As President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, he oversees a multi-billion-dollar portfolio spanning security, networking, collaboration, and AI-driven platforms—the invisible infrastructure that allows the modern digital economy to function.

When Patel talks about artificial intelligence, he doesn’t speak in terms of features or trends. He speaks in terms of tectonic shifts.

“We are witnessing with AI one of the most consequential platform shifts within our lifetimes and in the history of humanity,” Patel said. But for all the excitement surrounding AI’s potential, he is quick to point out that its progress is constrained in ways many leaders underestimate.

The first limitation is physical. “We don’t have enough power, we don’t have enough compute and we don’t have enough network bandwidth to satiate the needs of AI,” he explained. As AI enters what Patel calls its “agentic phase,” systems will no longer wait passively for human input. “These agents are going to be working 7 by 24 autonomously,” exchanging massive volumes of data with one another. That reality demands “a completely different architecture both in the data center, as well as outside of the data center.”

Yet infrastructure, Patel argues, is not the most dangerous constraint. Trust is.

“There is a trust deficit,” he said. “Sometimes people don’t trust these systems enough to use them.” That skepticism is fueled by two forces moving in parallel. The first is the rise of adversaries using AI at machine scale. “If you have attacks happening at machine scale, you can no longer have defenses at human scale,” Patel warned. The second is AI’s inherent unpredictability. “These models are, by definition, non-deterministic,” he said. “Hallucination is fantastic when you’re writing poetry. It’s really bad in cyber security.”

For Patel, this means securing AI itself—not just using AI to defend existing systems. “We need to make sure that we actually drive a very, very clear mechanism for securing AI itself,” he said, emphasizing runtime guardrails that prevent models from being manipulated or “tricked” into producing harmful outcomes.

As AI becomes more capable, it is also becoming more embedded in daily work. Patel believes the very definition of collaboration is changing. “These are not going to be looked at as tools,” he said. “They’re going to be looked at as an augmentation of a teammate to your team.” In a future filled with thousands of agents working alongside humans, “most of the software and most of the technology that gets built will be built for agents first before they get built for humans.”

Inside Cisco, that future is already arriving. “In the year 2026 we expect to see products that are 100% built with AI,” Patel said. “That should tell you the profound acceleration that that creates in just innovation velocity.”

But speed alone does not guarantee impact. Patel described what he calls a “capabilities overhang,” where AI’s potential far exceeds how organizations are actually using it. “Most of these AI systems have built far more capability than what you and I are actually using,” he said. The missing piece is workflow redesign. “There wasn’t really any wholesale change in the way that the workflows got reconstructed in most companies.”

That gap explains why Patel is blunt about leaders who choose to wait. “The strategy of sitting on the sideline waiting for someone else to figure it out is exactly the wrong strategy,” he said. At Cisco, the initial goal wasn’t outcomes—it was usage. “For the first quarter, all we measured was adoption.” The message to employees was unmistakable: “If you don’t use AI, you will not have a job at Cisco.”

Security risks, Patel noted, are becoming both more sophisticated and more personal. “The personalization of the emails and the text attacks are so much more sophisticated than what they used to be,” he said. Avoiding AI is not protection. “The more you use it, the safer you’re going to be,” because familiarity builds instinct.

Beyond individual companies, Patel sees AI reshaping geopolitics. “Technology strategy is going to be intrinsically tied to public policy,” he said. Nations, he argues, will compete on their ability to generate AI tokens efficiently. “Tokens per dollar per watt is the future currency.” That competition will drive “trillions of dollars” in infrastructure investment and radically new data center architectures spanning continents.

As experimentation gives way to accountability, Patel believes companies are entering a new phase. “This is not just a science experiment,” he said. ROI will come from revenue growth, productivity gains, or risk mitigation. The stakes are stark. “There will be only two kinds of companies—those that are dexterous with the use of AI and those that will really struggle for any kind of relevance.”

Trust, ultimately, is the deciding factor. “If you don’t trust the system, you will never use the system,” Patel said. And trust cannot be retrofitted. “It cannot be an afterthought.”

Looking ahead, Patel challenges leaders to rethink what expertise even means. “Knowledge is getting commoditized,” he said. The differentiator will be curiosity. “The next generation of leader has to get infinitely better at the class of quality questions we ask.”

That responsibility extends well beyond quarterly results. “We all have far more responsibility to not just move fast, but move fast with the level of judgment and caution exercised at what this would do to the corpus of humanity,” Patel said. AI, he believes, can “cure diseases, improve lifespans, solve problems,” but only if leaders confront the downsides with equal seriousness.

The lesson Patel says he learned the hard way is deceptively simple. “Most things that don’t work [fail because of] lack of extreme clarity.” Clarity, he argues, reduces politics, builds trust, and aligns performance. “Internal competition happens when there’s a lack of clarity.”

In an era defined by unprecedented acceleration, Patel’s message is clear: the future belongs not to the fastest movers, but to the leaders who build trust deliberately, rethink work honestly, and bring clarity to complexity—before complexity outruns them.