In February, agents passed humans in token consumption. By August, their consumption had grown 14x, and today it is five times that of humans. Jeetu Patel thinks under 2% of people use agents as power users right now, and that it will be 30 to 40% within 15 months.
In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO at Product School, closes out ProductCon San Francisco with Jeetu Patel, President & CPO at Cisco, a company at over 63 billion in revenue, growing to north of $ 70 billion.
Key Takeaways:
Owner mentality versus functional management, why founder mode a...
What Jeetendra Patel said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Jeetendra Patel, President & Chief Product Officer at Cisco, discussed his "owner mentality" leadership philosophy, contrasting it with functional management and emphasizing the need for an owner mindset during platform shifts. He detailed Cisco's transformation from a holding company into a platform company, explaining that Cisco has no product managers, only feature managers who build for the platform. Patel advocated building products rather than acquiring them, and described his approach to acquisitions, including killing acquired brands and giving founders larger missions. He predicted rapid growth in AI agent usage, stating that agents now consume 5x more tokens than humans and that by 2026, 60% of compute will go to inference. He discussed business model disruption from agents, the rise of physical AI, and the importance of judgment in product management. He also shared personal habits like weekly dinners with outsiders and his daughter's AI-enabled startup.
Key takeaways
Agents now consume 5x more tokens than humans, up from surpassing humans in February of this year.
Predicted that in 12-15 months, 30-40% of humans will use agents in a power user capacity, up from sub-2% today.
Cisco has no product managers, only feature managers; they build features for the platform, not individual products.
Cisco's strategy is build-first, not acquisition-driven; they killed the brand of most acquired companies except Splunk.
By end of 2026, 60% of world's compute will be consumed for inference, not training.
Well, I tell you, your team lies. Because like if Jeetu wouldn't be in this business, he'd be an actor. It's like there's no freaking way someone will give me a job. Bald, fat, Indian guy? How many of those have you seen working here? You know?
As a startup founder, I actually run my company in founder mode, which is not easy. But it seems like you're also encouraging this type of founder mindset at a much larger scale. So I'm curious about how you actually make it happen.
So one of the things I found — because my first like 17 years of my career, I ran my own business, and then I went to a very large company. And what I found is there's two kinds of people. There are people who are functional managers that are very, very good at going out and making sure that they can run their function well. And then there are people who are like owner mentality that run their business. By the way, you need both. It's not like one is better than the other. I'm clearly the latter. I've always had like an owner mentality.
But people, if you're an owner mentality, you can tend to piss off a lot of functional people. Because what the functional people want is they want to make sure that they're staying in their swim lane. You stay in your swim lane, I stay in my swim lane. I'm going to run my function, you run your function. And then we'll just go at it that way.
Owner mentality people poke their nose into everything. Like, this is not working for the business. I don't really care whose function it is. I'm going to go tell them it's not working because we got to fix it so that we can make sure that we win in the market.
It annoys the out of the people that are on the functional side of the house. So you have to make sure that if you make the cultural change, you make it very explicit that we value an owner mindset. And so at Cisco, we've actually done that. We've actually said we value an owner mindset. So when you think about this, don't think from your function and your silo; think from — you know, like I think of myself as a late-stage co-founder of Cisco. I was 36 years late to the game. But it's my company. If anyone tries to mess with my company, it's not going to be good. You know, back off. I used to — was I allowed to swear on your podcast?
That would be bad. So anyway, that I think is pretty important. And especially at a time when you're in war-time mode, and you're at a time like this when things are moving from — you're having a platform shift and everything's changing and you're refactoring your entire business, it's very hard to be in a functional mode and actually win in the market. So what you want to be is in complete owner mentality, founder mode. And so when you make a decision to go to a company, try to assess which mode they're operating in. And if it's in the mode that you don't actually value, don't go there, you know, because you'll find yourself superbly frustrated all the time unless you have enough agency to change the mode. You know.
Yeah, I want to connect that to what you just said: war mode versus peace mode. I mean, it seems like a couple of years ago you went through an important org design, right? Instead of having the traditional business unit design, you went into a more cross-functional platform design.
Patel, J. (2026, October 20). President & CPO at Cisco | Why Agents Now Consume 5x More Tokens Than Humans [Interview transcript]. Product School. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3113878/
MLA
Jeetendra Patel. "President & CPO at Cisco | Why Agents Now Consume 5x More Tokens Than Humans." Product School, 20 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3113878/.
BibTeX
@misc{patel2026_3113878,
author = {Jeetendra Patel},
title = {President \& CPO at Cisco | Why Agents Now Consume 5x More Tokens Than Humans},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Product School. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3113878/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
