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Jeetendra Patel

President & Chief Product Officer, Cisco

Search every verified Jeetendra Patel interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jeetendra Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, has been active in public discussions about AI and its enterprise implications. He has stated that AI agents surpassed humans in token consumption in February 2026, with agent consumption growing 14x by August and now reaching five times that of humans. Patel has expressed a view that under 2% of people currently use agents as power users, projecting this will rise to 30-40% within 15 months. He has described the current period as moving from AI adoption to AI delegation, where work is increasingly handed to autonomous agents. Patel has also spoken about the security challenges posed by AI, comparing agents to teenagers that are "supremely intelligent" but exercise poor judgment. He has argued that AI poses a material security risk to the market and has called for speeding up innovation around safety and security to match the pace of AI development. Speaking about Cisco's business, Patel has said the company is building the "critical infrastructure for the AI era" and has described the recent period as one of significant innovation, including new silicon for networking, reimagined security for agentic AI, and the Cisco Data Fabric powered by Splunk. He has also said he expects the company to need more engineers, not fewer, and has argued that the industry is not overbuilding data centers because infrastructure is being consumed as quickly as it is built.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“Tokens are going to be a constrained resource for a while because we're going to be in a supply constrained world. If sub 2% of the people use agents today and we are completely out of infrastructure available, any kind of infrastructure that comes online gets instantly consumed. Imagine what happens when 15, 20, 30% of humans start using agents on a regular basis as power users. You're going to start to have a whole”

“The speed at which we are able to go out and find vulnerabilities has exponentially increased. But the amount of time it takes from the time that you announce a vulnerability to when an exploit happens is about 9 to 15 minutes. The amount of time it takes to go out and issue a patch and actually have the patch implemented is about 45 days. You've got this window of time where there's an exposure window which is very ”

“I know that there is a lot of negativity in America around AI that is the meme that actually spreads, but I tend to be very long on AI. I feel like there is a tremendous amount of upside and we are about to experience the second chat GPT moment. And I thought it was going to happen when open claw came out. I was wrong. It didn't happen when open clock came out because I think it was too complicated for the average us”

“Categorically not. And let me tell you why. People try to equate this to the dotcom boom days. What was happening during that time is you were building out infrastructure and you were hoping that demand would catch up to the supply. Right now, no matter how much infrastructure you're building, it's getting consumed almost instantly. So there's no patch of time, you're supply constrained despite the exponential growth”

“I think what you have to do is you have to teach people how to do things by making sure that you're optimizing for the right metrics. So, I would not focus on how many agents they can spin up or not spin up. I would focus on giving them a budget and saying you have this budget within which you have to get this job done. And so have at it. If you want to use 400 agents and you know expend your budget that way that's u”

“I think you'll have the second and third be parallel. So, it'll be physical AI will be the third phase. But I think on the second phase, it's a really interesting time because when we talked a year ago, we were talking about just entering into the agentic era. In February of this year, Open Router did a study that showed that the token consumption by agents has now exceeded that of humans. And since February, from Fe”

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