Latest news with #JeetuPatel
Egypt Independent
2 days ago
- Business
- Egypt Independent
Top exec reveals the ‘stupidest thing' companies adopting AI can do
Las Vegas — The president of Cisco rejects the doomsday warnings from some tech leaders that artificial intelligence will make entry-level jobs vanish. 'I just refuse to believe that humans are going to be obsolete. It just seems like it's an absurd concept,' Jeetu Patel, who's also the chief product officer at AI infrastructure company Cisco, told CNN. While Patel acknowledged there will be 'growing pains where people will get disrupted,' he strongly pushed back on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's comments saying AI will spike unemployment to as high as 20% and eliminate half of all white-collar entry level jobs. He's one of several tech leaders that have pushed back on Amodei's narrative; others have said AI is likely to change jobs by requiring workers to adopt new skills rather than wiping out jobs completely. Still, his comments come amid a plunge in entry-level hiring and as tech giants are increasingly using AI in the workplace, raising questions about the future of work. 'Dario is a friend. We are investors in Anthropic. I have a ton of respect for what he's done. In this area though, I have a slightly different opinion on a couple of different dimensions,' Patel said Wednesday at Ai4, an AI conference in Las Vegas. 'I reject the notion that humans are going to be obsolete in like five years, that we're not going to have anything to do and we're going to be sitting on the beach… It doesn't make any sense.' In particular, Patel said he has a 'huge concern' with Amodei's line of thinking that AI could wipe out entry-level jobs because companies benefit from adding younger workers who often better understand new technologies. 'If you just say, 'I'm going to eradicate all entry-level jobs,' that's the stupidest thing a company can do in the long term because what you've done is you've actually taken away the injection of new perspective,' the Cisco exec said. 'A really bad strategy' Patel argued that for some jobs, having significant experience can be a 'massive liability.' For instance, he said people often hold assumptions about things that may not have worked five years ago, but do now. That's why Patel said he spends 'an enormous amount of time' with younger employees and interns. Jeetu Patel, the president of Cisco, in April 2023. He said younger employees and interns often give new perspectives. Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images 'I learn a lot from people who've just gotten out of college because they have a fresh and unique perspective. And that perspective coupled with (my) experience makes magic happen,' Patel said. 'It would be a really bad strategy to not have early in career people and entry level people injected in your workplace.' Is AI already hurting entry-level workers? However, some economists say there are early signs suggesting AI may already be depressing entry-level jobs. Even though the overall job market has been mostly healthy, the Class of 2025 faces the worst job market for new college graduates in years. For the first time since tracking started in 1980, the unemployment rate for recent graduates (those 22 to 27 years old with at least a bachelor's degree) is higher than the national unemployment rate, according to Oxford Economics. Entry-level hiring has tumbled by 23% between March 2020 and May 2025, outpacing the 18% decline in overall hiring over that span, according to data from LinkedIn. This is happening for a variety of reasons, some of them unrelated to AI. The Class of 2025 faces the worst job market for new college graduates in years. Allison Robbert/TheBut AI does seem to be playing a role, some economists say. For instance, Oxford Economics noted that employment in two industries vulnerable to AI disruption — computer science and mathematics — has dropped by 8% since 2022 for recent graduates. By comparison, employment has little changed in those industries for older workers. 'AI is definitely displacing some of these lower-level jobs,' Matthew Martin, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, told CNN in June. 'AI can't buy you a steak dinner' Economists and AI researchers say the jobs most at risk involve repetitive tasks that can be automated, such as data input. 'The less interesting clerical jobs will go away. They will be automated. And if you don't automate, you'll go out of business,' Alan Ranger, vice president of marketing at Cognigy, told CNN on the sidelines of Ai4. Cognigy would know: It sells conversational AI agents that provide customer support for banks, airlines and other companies. Ranger said Cognigy's AI agents came to the rescue when German airline Lufthansa had to cancel every flight due to a strike in Germany earlier this year. The technology allowed Lufthansa to rebook thousands of flights per minute, he said. Ranger argued that companies won't massively lay off customer support workers because humans still need to manage the AI agents, design the software and tackle other complex issues. Yet he did concede that companies will have fewer customer support workers in the future as people leave the industry and retire, and because firms will hire for different roles. 'Account management and sales roles won't get replaced anytime soon,' Ranger said. 'An AI can't buy you a steak dinner.' Patel, the Cisco executive, said the onus is on the tech industry and society as a whole to ensure a smooth transition to superintelligent AI. 'In tech, we live in a bubble. We keep thinking, 'Oh, disruption is just part of it.' But when a steel mill worker gets disrupted, they don't become an AI prompt engineer,' he said. Patel said there is a lot of retraining and reskilling that must be done in tandem with governments and educators. 'The tech community has to actually take some responsibility for this,' he said. 'Because if we don't, you will create some level of pain in society and we want to make sure we avoid that.'
CNN
3 days ago
- Business
- CNN
Top exec reveals the ‘stupidest thing' companies adopting AI can do
AI Job market Aviation news EconomyFacebookTweetLink Follow The president of Cisco rejects the doomsday warnings from some tech leaders that artificial intelligence will make entry-level jobs vanish. 'I just refuse to believe that humans are going to be obsolete. It just seems like it's an absurd concept,' Jeetu Patel, who's also the chief product officer at AI infrastructure company Cisco, told CNN. While Patel acknowledged there will be 'growing pains where people will get disrupted,' he strongly pushed back on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's comments saying AI will spike unemployment to as high as 20% and eliminate half of all white-collar entry level jobs. He's one of several tech leaders that have pushed back on Amodei's narrative; others have said AI is likely to change jobs by requiring workers to adopt new skills rather than wiping out jobs completely. Still, his comments come amid a plunge in entry-level hiring and as tech giants are increasingly using AI in the workplace, raising questions about the future of work. 'Dario is a friend. We are investors in Anthropic. I have a ton of respect for what he's done. In this area though, I have a slightly different opinion on a couple of different dimensions,' Patel said Wednesday at Ai4, an AI conference in Las Vegas. 'I reject the notion that humans are going to be obsolete in like five years, that we're not going to have anything to do and we're going to be sitting on the beach… It doesn't make any sense.' In particular, Patel said he has a 'huge concern' with Amodei's line of thinking that AI could wipe out entry-level jobs because companies benefit from adding younger workers who often better understand new technologies. 'If you just say, 'I'm going to eradicate all entry-level jobs,' that's the stupidest thing a company can do in the long term because what you've done is you've actually taken away the injection of new perspective,' the Cisco exec said. Patel argued that for some jobs, having significant experience can be a 'massive liability.' For instance, he said people often hold assumptions about things that may not have worked five years ago, but do now. That's why Patel said he spends 'an enormous amount of time' with younger employees and interns. 'I learn a lot from people who've just gotten out of college because they have a fresh and unique perspective. And that perspective coupled with (my) experience makes magic happen,' Patel said. 'It would be a really bad strategy to not have early in career people and entry level people injected in your workplace.' However, some economists say there are early signs suggesting AI may already be depressing entry-level jobs. Even though the overall job market has been mostly healthy, the Class of 2025 faces the worst job market for new college graduates in years. For the first time since tracking started in 1980, the unemployment rate for recent graduates (those 22 to 27 years old with at least a bachelor's degree) is higher than the national unemployment rate, according to Oxford Economics. Entry-level hiring has tumbled by 23% between March 2020 and May 2025, outpacing the 18% decline in overall hiring over that span, according to data from LinkedIn. This is happening for a variety of reasons, some of them unrelated to AI. But AI does seem to be playing a role, some economists say. For instance, Oxford Economics noted that employment in two industries vulnerable to AI disruption — computer science and mathematics — has dropped by 8% since 2022 for recent graduates. By comparison, employment has little changed in those industries for older workers. 'AI is definitely displacing some of these lower-level jobs,' Matthew Martin, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, told CNN in June. Economists and AI researchers say the jobs most at risk involve repetitive tasks that can be automated, such as data input. 'The less interesting clerical jobs will go away. They will be automated. And if you don't automate, you'll go out of business,' Alan Ranger, vice president of marketing at Cognigy, told CNN on the sidelines of Ai4. Cognigy would know: It sells conversational AI agents that provide customer support for banks, airlines and other companies. Ranger said Cognigy's AI agents came to the rescue when German airline Lufthansa had to cancel every flight due to a strike in Germany earlier this year. The technology allowed Lufthansa to rebook thousands of flights per minute, he said. Ranger argued that companies won't massively lay off customer support workers because humans still need to manage the AI agents, design the software and tackle other complex issues. Yet he did concede that companies will have fewer customer support workers in the future as people leave the industry and retire, and because firms will hire for different roles. 'Account management and sales roles won't get replaced anytime soon,' Ranger said. 'An AI can't buy you a steak dinner.' Patel, the Cisco executive, said the onus is on the tech industry and society as a whole to ensure a smooth transition to superintelligent AI. 'In tech, we live in a bubble. We keep thinking, 'Oh, disruption is just part of it.' But when a steel mill worker gets disrupted, they don't become an AI prompt engineer,' he said. Patel said there is a lot of retraining and reskilling that must be done in tandem with governments and educators. 'The tech community has to actually take some responsibility for this,' he said. 'Because if we don't, you will create some level of pain in society and we want to make sure we avoid that.'
Forbes
06-08-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Tech Giants Are Reinventing Cybersecurity For The AI Agent Era
As autonomous agents begin making decisions and moving data independently, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and IBM are reengineering enterprise security with AI. (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images Agentic AI is no longer confined to pioneering companies. These systems now operate across enterprise environments, accessing resources, making decisions and taking action with minimal human oversight. But with this autonomy comes a new class of risk. Security frameworks built for predictable, human-centric workflows are ill-equipped to handle agents that operate at machine speed, modify APIs and move sensitive data independently. More than half (56%) of enterprise executives named security as their top concern in UiPath's 2025 Agentic AI Report , followed by compliance, cost and integration complexity. Gartner forecasts that by 2027 , more than 40% of agentic AI projects may be scrapped due to weak governance and inadequate risk management. 'Every new AI agent is both an asset and a new risk. Securing agentic AI is a fundamentally new challenge where we need to integrate predictable guardrails and policies into what are, by definition, non-deterministic systems. These are some of the biggest challenges in the history of security,' Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco, told me. 'In conversations with security and infrastructure leaders, the disconnect is often around how quickly legacy security paradigms and teams can evolve to meet this new reality.' Today, the security conversation is shifting from protecting data to safeguarding the decisions AI systems are now making autonomously. As companies rush to upgrade their networks to support agentic AI and IoT, many risk overlooking security in the process. As many as 97% of businesses say network upgrades are essential for the success of their AI and IoT initiatives, according to Cisco's IT Networking Leader Survey 2025 . However, the stakes are high, too; just one severe outage can cost the global economy nearly $160 billion. 'On the enterprise side, awareness is growing fast — but what's less visible is how much activity is happening within business units, often without security teams fully in the loop,' Fernando Montenegro, VP and cybersecurity practice lead at The Futurum Group, told me. 'Many of them already understand the urgency around agentic AI, but security teams need to be in the conversation early.' Legacy defenses are fundamentally incompatible with the demands of agentic AI. As API calls multiply and agent behavior grows more opaque, traditional monitoring tools are struggling to keep pace. Without real-time visibility and control, agents can behave unpredictably or even dangerously. What's needed now are new capabilities: continuous auditability, transparency and rapid remediation. To mitigate the growing security risks of agentic systems, technology giants across the industry are now building governance and security solutions to meet the scale and speed of agentic AI. For instance, Microsoft has launched AI-powered Security Copilots that detect and neutralize threats with limited human intervention. Google Cloud is emphasizing traceability and auditability across its AI services. IBM is applying identity governance to AI systems. Likewise, cloud networking and security company Cisco is embedding security deeper into the network, down to the silicon layer. The company recently introduced its AgenticOps strategy, which combines real-time observability, zero-trust frameworks and AI-native operations into a single enterprise architecture. 'The tech and security community is recognizing that to govern this new ecosystem, we need purpose-built frameworks that combine security, deep cross-domain context and continuous oversight, not just bolt-on controls,' DJ Sampath, SVP of AI software and platform at Cisco, told me. 'Three things are non-negotiable: human-in-the-loop oversight, cross-domain context for every decision and security built in at every layer from silicon to software.' At the heart of this model is Cisco's Deep Network Model, a domain-specific large language model trained on decades of telemetry data (data from remote or hard-to-access systems, whether due to complexity or safety). It aims to equip security teams with natural language tools to monitor, investigate and respond to incidents in real time. In essence, it's AI built to defend against AI. The company has also introduced a Universal Zero Trust Network Access framework that extends identity-based controls to include delegated authorization, which lets users securely grant access to trusted service providers without sharing their credentials; proximity-based phishing resistance, which verifies that a request is coming from a nearby, trusted device; and support for the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP), a new standard that allows AI systems to securely share context across different applications. 'We're future-proofing networks with AI so they can recognize and mediate agent behavior at scale,' Patel explained. 'Security must be as fast and adaptive as the AI agents themselves.' Patel notes that agentic AI is driving unprecedented levels of operational speed and complexity, and while the industry is making headway, the biggest bottlenecks are now surfacing in the network layer. 'Many of the primary limiting factors on AI scale outs like power consumption and inefficient GPU utilization can be directly addressed by more efficient networking and orchestration that makes sure data in where it's needed, when it's needed,' he said. Building on this vision, Cisco is deepening its integrations following the acquisition of Splunk. Telemetry from Cisco firewalls now feeds directly into Splunk's security platform, enabling automated response playbooks and correlating threat signals across the agentic application stack. The organizations that will thrive in this new era are those that embrace a simple truth: if AI is the engine of enterprise innovation, AI-powered security must be its steering system. The most critical work around agentic AI today, Montenegro says, involves building a deep, transparent understanding of two foundational areas: First, how the organization functions, i.e., its key business processes, stakeholder relationships and desired outcomes. And second, how modern AI systems, particularly agents, operate at a technical level, how abstract concepts are translated into math, what infrastructure is needed to support these algorithms and how they interact within a system. 'Once these two foundations are in place, the organization will be in a much stronger position to evaluate and deploy agentic workflows across multiple use cases,' he adds. The next generation of cybersecurity won't be defined by how fast it reacts to threats, but by how intelligently it anticipates them. And that future is already taking shape. 'Pre-training lays the foundation, but in the agentic era it's not enough. We need real-time feedback loops. Systems must continuously learn and harden as agents interact and adapt,' Cisco's Sampath told me. 'AgenticOps flips the script: now AI agents aren't just generating insights, they're proactively defending and adapting the network in real time.'
Time of India
17-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Agentic AI is here and Chuck Robbins wants Cisco at the core
At Cisco Live in San Diego this June, the networking giant outlined its most aggressive push yet into AI infrastructure, launching new products aimed at helping enterprises scale agentic AI while tightening control over their cloud environments. 'We're witnessing an unprecedented surge in innovation as organizations embrace agentic AI to automate workflows and solve complex problems,' said Jeetu Patel, President & Chief Product Officer, Cisco, at Cisco Live in San Diego. But it was in a quieter setting—Cisco's Mumbai office weeks later—where President Jeetu Patel and CEO Chuck Robbins laid out the deeper strategic logic behind those announcements, speaking about how enterprise demands are shifting. Agentic AI—software agents that can independently take actions on behalf of users—is already being deployed across industries. For instance, at Ford Motor Company, the technology is embedded across business functions. 'Agentic AI is being used across Ford's business, from design to engineering to manufacturing and for customer support,' said Patrick Milligan, the company's Chief Information Security Officer at Cisco Live, San Diego. 'As we build, deploy, and manage sophisticated AI capabilities at scale, Cisco's networking and security solutions are an important part of the overall technology infrastructure.' Reimagining workflows Speaking in Mumbai, Patel detailed areas where enterprise use cases are gaining traction. 'Every workflow is going to get automated over the next few quarters or years,' he said. 'A lot of the momentum is in coding, second—call centers and customer support where virtual agents are pretty big use case, third that doesn't get talked about enough but is getting a lot of momentum in the US is computing use—where an agent, installed on your computer, will on your behalf go on a browser, give approvals, reserve tickets, basically perform consumer use cases, business to business use cases. Every functional area will be reimagined with AgenticAI.' Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, leading to a 30% reduction in operational costs. Cisco appears determined to be the backbone behind that transformation. To support this shift, Cisco launched Secure AI Factory in collaboration with NVIDIA—offering a full stack of infrastructure, security, and AI software to help enterprises deploy and operate agentic AI at scale. It also introduced an expanded range of Cisco AI PODs that support edge AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), model training, and large-scale inferencing with lower TCO and greater control. As these technologies roll out, CIOs face mounting complexity—from managing fragmented infrastructure to ensuring AI lifecycle security. Cisco is positioning itself as the glue between AI innovation and trusted operational execution. Cloud: Repatriated or reimagined? Underneath the AI gold rush, a quieter—but no less significant—trend is reshaping enterprise infrastructure choices: cloud repatriation . According to the Barclays CIO Survey (H1 2024), 83% of enterprise CIOs plan to repatriate at least some workloads by the end of 2024—up from 43% in the second half of 2020. This strategic pivot means enterprises are reassessing where their workloads should live—whether due to cost, performance, or sovereignty concerns. Robbins acknowledging the shift said: 'If you think of sovereignty issues, leading countries around the world (are) to build their own data centers, particularly AI applications. That's what we do for a living. We aren't trying to sell anything to you as a service, we are helping you stand up the service with our infrastructure and security. If the trend continues—it is actually good for us.' Patel offered a nuanced view. 'It is not as much about repatriation but about reaccelerating private clouds,' he said. 'You are not seeing workloads being brought back from the public cloud to the private cloud but new workloads starting to emerge on the private cloud.' Infrastructure as strategy For enterprise tech leaders, the message is clear: AI agents will soon automate everything from customer support to internal approvals. Meanwhile, companies are reassessing the public cloud-first mindset that dominated the last decade. Cisco's bet is that it can meet both demands—with a full-stack, secure, and sovereign-ready platform. And as Patel put it in Mumbai: 'Every functional area will get reimagined with AgenticAI.'
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
3 reasons Cisco's president says CEOs aren't ready for AI
Cisco (CSCO) president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel sits down with Morning Brief Market Sunrise Host Ramzan Karmali to discuss the challenges companies and workforces face transitioning to the AI era. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief: Market Sunrise here. Now recently I spoke to the Secretary General of the OECD, and I asked him whether, you know, AI was here to take away our jobs. What do you say to that question? You know, I I I hear that a lot these days, and the my advice over there is, I actually personally worry less about AI taking people's jobs, and I worry more about people that use AI well, uh, that can get the job done better than the folks that are doing it taking those jobs. And so, in my mind, I think it's, um, it's very important for people to actually not sit on the sidelines and start experimenting and get dextrous with the use of AI, because I think there's only going to be two kinds of companies in the world. There's going to be companies that are very skilled with the use of AI, and then there are going to be companies that are going to struggle for relevance. And you want to have more and more of the companies in the first category than the second. Hopefully, we can help with that. Uh, you know, it was interesting, we've done some studies, um, recently with CEOs of companies, and about 97% of the companies, their CEOs are optimistic about the future of AI, but only 1.7% of them feel prepared. So then you ask the question, why that dissonance? And there's three things that come up: is the infrastructure available and ready so that people can make the most use of AI, that's number one; number two is this notion of safety and security, can I trust this system so I feel comfortable using it. For the first time in history, security has become a prerequisite and an accelerant for the adoption of AI. That has not been the case in the past. In the past, you either picked security or you picked productivity. It was one or the other, right? And then the third one is a skill shortage. And so right now, while people think that jobs are going away, right now there's such a huge demand for people that actually are dextrous with the use of AI uh to be hired. So in um in my opinion, jumping in and actually learning about AI is a much better strategy than worrying about whether or not it's going to take your job away. But as a company that cares quite a lot about cyber security, as you've mentioned, how can we be secure that these machines won't, um, put our safety at risk, our security at risk, our data at risk? Yep. It's actually a great question. So one of the things to keep in mind is the application architecture on how applications got built over the past 20 years is fundamentally changing because you used to have an infrastructure layer, a data layer, and a business logic layer. Now you've kind of inserted this new layer called the models. Now, what is interesting about models, and what's the core characteristic of a model? It's non-deterministic, which means it's unpredictable by nature. Sometimes it hallucinates. Hallucination can be a feature in certain aspects, it can be a bug in the other. If you're writing poetry, it's fantastic. If you're actually going out and trying to make sure that you, uh, do cyber security, it's a really bad thing for hallucination to happen. And so what we have done is provided capabilities to be able to do three things: figure out what data is flowing into these systems, into these models, um, and then number two, provide validation for these models, because these models need to get, um, you know, kind of validated on whether or not they're going to behave as predictably as you're expecting them to behave. And so what you want to do is you want to make sure that you determine when this model can be jailbroken. Jailbroken being another word for, is it behaving in ways that are different from what you expected to behave? And then provide runtime enforcement of guard rails so that any application developer doesn't have to think about building a full cyber security stack. You have a common substrate of security across all models, all agents, all applications that are getting built. And that's what we've actually built at Cisco. So we've built this kind of capability to protect, uh, the models and secure AI itself. And if we can do this in the right way, there's there's magic that can start happening because what you do is you you allow people to trust these systems so that they feel comfortable to use them. Today, one of the big deficits in these systems is people just feel nervous using them because they don't know what's going to happen to them. And so that's what we're trying to do, is if you can democratize the use of AI by making them safe and secure, you can start solving problems that we had never imagined solving before. I mean, imagine if you had a different set of original insights that were, you know, derived from AI that could allow you to solve cancer. Now, do you think this is why investors seem to like what they're hearing from Cisco? I mean, I've seen the stock's up around a fifth in the last three months. Is that is it all down to, uh, you know, your your move into, you know, really trying to get into all areas of AI? I think our the the thing that people are starting to see is Cisco is the critical infrastructure provider for the AI movement. And if you think about the amount of money over the course of the next few years that's going to be spent on AI, trillions of dollars will be spent in building out this data center capacity because the data centers of yesterday just don't work to go out and fulfill the needs of the data centers that are needed for the AI movement. So you're going to need to have a whole new, uh, infrastructure that gets built out. And Cisco's technology is central to that infrastructure getting built out because like we talked about, there's three constraints: power, compute, and network bandwidth, along with a trust deficit that has to actually get bridged. And so the network bandwidth and the trust deficit, um, are two things that we actually work very closely with, and we partner with companies like Nvidia and AMD and provide the compute servers as well. And so you can start, and then we provide efficiency in our gear for for power so that every kilowatt of power that can be saved, uh, in our devices can actually go towards the GPUs which tend to be power hungry. So all of those things tell you that security is going to be a very, very critical infrastructure provider for the AI era. So you talked about your partnerships there with AMD and Nvidia. Have you got any new exclusive partnerships you want to reveal here? Uh, so we've actually got, you know, partnerships with, uh, OpenAI, we've got partnerships with, um, you know, Anthropic. I mean, there's there's a continued, uh, set of vendors that are out in the market that are continuing to have these partnerships. And, um, I would say that today we are in the second major phase of AI, which is agenti. Very soon, we'll also have physical AI, which is the robotic side that'll come up, and you should I I haven't said this anywhere else, but you should stay tuned on what Cisco is going to do in that side as well. So we've got to keep an eye on robotics. Keep an eye on robotics, keep an eye on the things that we might be able to do with robotics as, um, these models get more sophisticated to accommodate physical AI. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
