How to deal with AI era? Cisco CPO Jeetu Patel has advice for software engineers, says work on 2 skills
As AI continues to grow rapidly, many engineers are wondering what their future in the tech industry looks like. Cisco's Chief Product Officer (CPO) Jeetu Patel believes the role of engineers is far from over — but says they need to adapt and focus on new skills to stay valuable in this changing landscape.In a conversation with Business Insider, Patel said Cisco is still actively hiring engineers. The company currently has around 27,000 engineers and is looking for more. 'We feel more constrained now than ever before on not having enough engineers to get prosecuted all the ideas that we've got going internally,' he said.advertisementThat said, Patel admitted that AI is changing how engineering teams work. Cisco is already testing tools like OpenAI's Codex, an AI coding assistant that can write code, fix bugs, and run tests. With such tools becoming more common, Patel believes engineers will no longer need to focus heavily on writing perfect code. He suggested that knowing every detail of coding syntax won't be a big deal in the next five years. Instead, he highlighted two other skills that he feels are often underestimated but will matter a lot more in the future.
First, he talked about the importance of orchestrating agent workflows. In simple terms, this means managing a group of AI tools that work together. Engineers will need to figure out how to assign the right tasks to either humans or AI systems to get the job done efficiently. Patel said this will become a key part of engineering work going forward.advertisementThe second important skill, according to Patel, is the quality of ideas. As AI takes over repetitive tasks, human engineers will need to bring creativity and strong ideas to the table. He said tools like Codex help unlock people's imagination, allowing companies to move faster without being limited by the number of developers they have.He also added that AI will boost productivity in a big way. With the help of AI, engineers could become 10 to 50 times more productive — turning ideas into working products in minutes rather than months. This, Patel believes, will not only help companies move faster but also make work more satisfying for engineers. "The only constraint becomes their imagination," he said.Other tech leaders have expressed similar thoughts. For example, Dropbox executive Morgan Brown previously pointed out that in the AI era, what really matters is doing deep, thoughtful work and coming up with strong ideas. While AI may change the tools engineers use, Patel made it clear that the demand for skilled minds isn't going away — it's just changing in a new direction.
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