There's such a huge population demographic advantage that India has right now. That's one of the superpowers of India. Last night we were with the prime minister and the round table of it was just very encouraging to see everyone wanting to work together to make sure that we can further the cause.
Today I'm delighted to have with us Jitu Patel, president at Cisco and chief product officer, has been here at the summit and is one of the global thinkers.
While I was in undergrad, I didn't have enough money to actually pay for school, and so I was afraid that I'm going to get deported because I don't have enough money for tuition.
With Indian CEOs and executives running so many firms in the US, the discourse becomes that look how well Indians are doing. But I think the stories of struggle, rejection and darker sort of moments never gets highlighted.
Modern software development has completely flipped now to being fully automated.
There's a lot of talk now of how in the vector world where agents are going to be our colleagues.
All of us are going to be managers of agents.
But here in India and many other parts of the world, it's going to be possibly very disruptive.
Some jobs will categorically get lost. Every job will get reconfigured. But there'll be entirely new industries that get created for the jobs that don't exist right now. When it comes to coding, I'm very sympathetic to the fear that people have saying, okay, so what am I going to do as an engineer if I don't code? We have now got 100% of one product that we have in our portfolio that is coded fully by AI, no human code written. However, that doesn't mean that we don't need human engineers in there. That where I think this could go wrong is if you get intellectually lazy and don't have deep thinking. There's a possibility to could actually find tremendous amount of intellectual rigor that comes out of this.
Hi and welcome to today's episode of the AI Futures podcast series where we're bringing you some of the best and leading thinkers, actors, leaders from the world of AI. And today I'm delighted to have with us as part of that series Jitu Patel. So welcome to our podcast.
Thank you for having me on the show on the road.
Now I'm excited to have you here with us. Tell us a little bit about your own personal journey. What took you from Bombay off to the states and how your different roles have evolved?
Yeah, I mean look, it was, I was in Bombay for the first 19 years of my life. And then decided that, you know, I had not a great relationship with my dad. He was kind of abusive to my mom. He tended to be, he was kind of in the wrong shady kind of businesses. I didn't want to actually associate with him that much. So at some point I'm like, you know, the best way for me is to get out and get away from him.
And so I left to go to get my undergrad done. In fact, I ran away from home. I took my mother and put her in an undisclosed location because he was pretty abusive to her. And then I just took a flight that night at 4 in the morning and, you know, went to...
Amazing. So this is like you were like 17, 18 at the time.
I was, I was 18 at the time. Oh, 18 or 19, you know, and 19 actually.
I went to my uncle's home in the US. He lived in Chicago and then...
It was an interesting story because I went there. I went to undergrad and then while I was in undergrad, I had this angel of a professor.
Because I didn't have enough money to actually pay for school.
And so I was like afraid that I'm going to get deported because I don't have enough money for tuition. This angel of a professor gave me an assistantship in the US as an undergrad for undergrads, which never happens. It was just a stroke of luck. It wasn't like I was a genius.
That's typically PhD students.
PhD students who get that kind of role. Correct. And but she was just like, she took a liking to me and she kind of helped me out and so that allowed me to get through school.
Yeah. And while I was there, she then introduced me to these guys who were starting out a market research firm. And so they said, 'Yeah, you might want to go intern there.' So I went and interned there. And then while I was interning, they offered me a job when I graduated.
And but they said like, 'Hey, look, we're going to be buying out the company from this original investor.' Like, 'Oh, oh.' And so I'm like, 'I want in.' And you know, I was making like four bucks an hour at the time. They didn't have enough money. And they said, 'Well, put in $4 million and you're in.'
And so there was this banker who used to be there that was also our customer. And you know, he was always a mentor to me over there. And so I went to him. I'm like, 'Can I borrow $250,000?' And the guy goes, 'Why do you need $250,000?' I'm like, 'I'm going to buy this company.' He's like, 'What are you going to do when you buy it?' I'm like, 'I'm going to run it.' And you know, you're young and dumb. You kind of don't know what the risk profiles are.
And that's the only time you can do this.
That's the only time you can do this actually is what I learned later. You get too analytical as you get older.
You get too risk averse later.
And so he said to me, 'Okay, son, come by tomorrow, pick it up.' And he gave me a loan at 10% interest. It was a hefty interest rate.
Yeah. For the US, that's high.
But he gave me the break. And so we bought the company. I ran that business for 17 years and it was like one of those things where, you know, my mother came over after like seven years of me not seeing her and then she lived there and she went back and forth and...
And then I got this itch for scale. I'm like, you know, I need to go and learn scale because this was a small business and you'd work hard, but didn't really feel like you're going to go change the world.
And I'm like, I want to get understand impact because the thing that fascinated me about America was the consistency across the entire country at scale and how businesses ran.
You know, and so I decided to go to a very large company from a very small company. So sub 20 people to 60,000 people. My god.
And you know, the guy who was actually interviewing me was an ex-Microsoft guy. His name is Rick Devonoody. He's still my coach to this day and he was my first boss that I went through over there. And so he basically was having dinner with me and I'm like, you know, his name is Rick, Rick Davonoodi. And I said, 'Rick, you got to pay me more. Like I've got so much experience. I've got 17 years of experience. You got to pay me more.' And he looked at me and a completely, you know, no expression on his face says, 'Jitu, you don't have 17 years of experience, you have one year of experience 17 times over and come work for me and I'll give you 17 years of experience in one year.'
And it was actually absolutely true. Like I learned more from him in the first year than I did running my own business for 17 years because he was operationally so astute.
And so I did that, then I, you know, then there was like one thing led to the other and I'd moved to Silicon Valley from Chicago and then, you know, things started compounding. I worked for Box. We took that business from 200 million to about 800 million. And then I was going to go join a fan company to run advertising and then Chuck Robbins, our CEO, called me and said, 'Hey, do you want to come work here?' I'm like, 'I've already accepted this job. I'm going to be going there.' 'Just come and talk to us.'
Good. And then that's how it starts.
Started that I was literally, I was nine days away from starting at that other company and one thing led to the other and, you know, here I am at Cisco. Probably the best career move I've ever made, I'd say.
So far. Yeah. I hope this is my last job though. Like I don't want to keep changing jobs for me is dramatic. It seems like a lot of work.
Yeah. Yeah. Now there's a couple of threads I want to pick up here from what you've described because, you know, in the whole mainstream discourse with Indian CEOs and executives running so many firms in the US, the discourse becomes that look how well Indians are doing. But I think the stories of struggle, the stories of probably a lot of like dejection and rejection and darker sort of moments never gets highlighted. So I'm glad that you've shared some of that personal journey with us and I want to pick up on two of those threads. One is the role of mentors and teachers which you pointed to and the other of course is how to make some of these shifts seamlessly like which you've done. So let's start off with the teachers and mentors and I'll tell you why I picked up on that amongst the various things you were describing because I think even for me as I've gone from let's say Delhi to, as we were discussing, to Singapore to the US, you're moving geographies often, you are leaving family behind as you did. Was that hard for you as you went from one country to the other and...
See, it's, I think looking back, it's when you're young, it's much easier. You're moving and it's exciting and it's a time of discovery and you're coming to a new place and realizing that, oh, this place is also exciting and interesting in many ways. So you make those moves, but I think it's only later when maybe your brain cells become slightly wiser that you realize that there were some things that you also lost along the way.
Yeah.
Right. But in all of that discomfort of moving, or some people manage it very seamlessly, I think for me it was not that hard to be honest, but the role of people who might not be your parents or your best friends becomes really important. I've had like even at the college I was mentioning at Haverford, my professors played a very similar role as what you were describing where she said, 'Listen, I like you, I'm going to help you figure out your path. I can see that sometimes you have this habit of deflecting to this thing or that thing. But I can sense where you are going to be really good at and let me help you push in that direction.' Yeah. Right. And I think that's what I wanted to ask you about, like other than that teacher of course, and then you've mentioned Rick and other mentors along the way.
Have they found you? Have you found them? I tend to be excessively annoying to people that I find I can learn from and just, you know, force them into mentoring me.
Because I found that to be one of the best ways to not get too self-absorbed in drinking your own Kool-Aid is get people that actually care about your well-being that will tell you the truth, correct? And can sort of see you from the outside, right? Can see you from the outside.
They know you well enough that they'll have your best interest.
Have the best interest at heart, but will be brutally honest with you about things. People love helping other people out. And so I think if you make sure that you take that advice in good stead and do things with it which are not just very transactional in nature, like what I hate when people come to me and say, 'I need a mentor,' and you come there and the first 15 minutes they'll ask you for something.
You know, like, 'Can I have a job now in your place?' It's like, no, that's not the point of this. The point is to actually impart learnings. And so I think it's been, I've been very fortunate to have a handful of mentors that actually have shaped my career and I would be nowhere without them.
The same kind of warming sort of feeling where I think especially for teachers and professors, I think hearing about where their students have moved to or how their journeys are panning out, I think for them it's especially satisfying for them. Yeah.
And you know, like I went to JD Somani in Bombay and one of my professors, he's a Hindi professor and his son is now in touch with me and I reached out to him one time and he almost started crying because he was so happy for the success that, you know, I've been lucky to enjoy and it's just a great...
It's very rewarding to just, it feels very fulfilling.
Yeah. And that's why I wanted to bring this out because I think for many students who might be watching or many young professionals who might be watching, it's very important to remember that there's a whole journey that takes you there and a whole set of people along the way.
Yeah. If you don't mind, I'll give you one story which was actually very seminal on this one is she passed away like 3 years ago and the last 8 weeks, you know, she had become almost like my child for the past decade and a half.
They say that that's historical because you're the child in there. But in the last eight weeks, we kind of knew that she was not going to make it.
Yeah.
You know, and she flipped again and she became a parent. And I was living with her in the hospital and I still remember I was going to go to Amsterdam for, I had to do a keynote or something at one of the Cisco events. And I'm like, 'Mama, I'm going to go for a day. I'll come back.' And she just nodded her. She said, 'No, you're not going to go anywhere.' I'm like, 'Why is that?' And she goes, 'Because I don't want you to have regret of something happening to me while you're gone.'
While you were gone for that one day.
And I don't want to leave after all these years.
Having you feeling a sense of guilt. So I'm going to give you over the course of the next few weeks all the closure that you need so that you're going to be okay once I'm gone.
Yeah. Yeah. Especially the massive role it seems like she has played in your life from those early days where that's driven you so much. So I think it's very fortunate that you've gotten that, you got that time.
I was so lucky to have with her at that stage. Yeah.
And by the way she said, you know, 'I want to die in your arms.' She died in my arms.
It was absolutely fantastic. We actually stayed for eight weeks together and I think those moments, you know, when you're younger, I think the kids that are watching your podcast right now, I think it's hard because of the pressure and social media and what's happening with AI and you have to learn and you feel like it's overwhelming and just get your core values right of being with the right, you know, people and having them coach and mentor you and the rest usually tends to work itself out if you...
As long as you have an outsized kind of curiosity for learning. Yeah, and be centered. I think that as you're rightly saying, at the end of the day, those eight weeks today will matter much more to you and will keep you grounded for the rest of your life than maybe another keynote that you would have delivered or, you know, another set of people you might have connected with, etc. So I think those values really need to stay strong, I think, which it seems in your case.
I was lucky that I was actually going to make the wrong call and she insisted that I don't.
I was going to say I expected her to say the reverse because I think most Indian parents of that generation are very sacrificial, right? They'll say, 'No, don't worry about me, you go do your thing so you'll succeed in whatever you're doing.' And so I was expecting your mom to have said the reverse, so I'm glad that she held you there.
She held me there and she kind of, you know, and we called every single person that had touched our lives and we said goodbye and it was magical.
Yeah. Yeah. No, lovely. It almost seems pointless now to move to the world of work of AI, of tech and AI. But given we have the AI summit and we're doing the AI futures conversation, Jitu, let me, and we can keep coming back to some of the, I think, personal lessons that maybe shape your professional career and outlooks also. So I don't mean to make a complete break from this, but let's now move to the world of AI and, you know, the cyber piece and the security piece that you have now been inhabiting. We had the India summit. It seems like there's a movement here that could either build momentum with the summit where the global south and countries like India could try and, you know, forge a different kind of vision maybe for AI, but I want to start off with your perspective on the global AI landscape today. Right now you understand India, you've grown up here, you're spending a lot of time here professionally as well. How's the global AI landscape according to you? Is it as, let's say, bipolar in its US-China as the two poles view of the world or is there a broader set of actors that practically and realistically you feel will emerge or will it largely remain the two key actors that are currently shaping the world of AI and what other aspects maybe of the global AI landscape you could highlight for us?
I think there's a bipolar dimension in a different way than what you were talking about that I've seen. There's a part of AI which is, and the prime minister very eloquently said that in his address yesterday that, you know, there's one aspect which is driven by what he called by fear.
And the other one which is driven by bhavishya, or what's the future look like, and the bhavishya side of things, I think there's a group of people in the world that think that this could be extremely damaging to society, and then there's other group of people that think that there's tremendous amount of upside and I actually...
So the optimist and the AI pessimist.
Optimist and pessimist, and I actually feel like the balanced view is having an extreme level of optimism and hope without losing sight of what the downsides could be.
And I think that's important and I think if we do this right, I think humanity lifts quite a bit and I actually feel like this event, India should congratulate itself because you set the stage for AI being something that has to happen at machine scale and machine speed, but with a degree of emphasis on human centricity.
And I feel like that's an area that India could play a pretty meaningful part. I mean look, India is going to be one of the largest consumers of AI technology of any other country in the world because of just the sheer amount of population. We have 1.4 billion people and there seems to be a fair amount of ingestion rate of these technologies that's happening. So from that perspective I feel like there's a tremendous opportunity for it not just being two countries in the world but more countries that can participate in different ways. By the way, and the overly simplistic narrative becomes, okay, so you're going to build your foundation models like you don't have to...
There's many, many games to be played.
There's many games to be played here and you have to make sure that you build on top of what someone else has built.
I always give people the example like if you think about Amazon, imagine if Amazon.com or Flipkart or whatever you, you know, pick your company of choice was built in the 1800s. It would be a massive failure because you didn't have any of the supporting infrastructure needed to go out and build it on top of. So, I think the way that we have to think about AI is build on top of the progress that's already made rather than thinking of replicating the progress that someone else has made.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a great point. I think that we get, and you know, I was mentioning to you that I look at a lot of the developments in AI from a geopolitical lens as well and I think more often than not countries are looking at this as a, you know, they only get focused when the mainstream starts talking about chips and the shortage of chips then everyone just puts all their efforts behind somehow procuring a few chips.
Then suddenly it becomes foundational models and then everyone's like, 'I'm going to build,' right? Whereas I think if you, and one of the things I mentioned in my book also, which I was referring to, The Great Tech Game, was actually with tech you cannot be catching the tails of waves.
You can't, you can't, you have to lead the waves.
You will not actually make any wealth out of it. You might get to partake in it in some shape or form, but you'll not get to really create wealth or real value out of it if you're just catching tails of waves or tails of things that are already done, as you were saying. And it's really important to actually have a view on the future of the bhavishya piece, which is, okay, what are early waves that will arise because of these...
Waves and now let me try and catch that one. So a surfer friend of mine actually made a very similar analogy and they said we have to pick...
One of the key things is I have to pick which wave I'm going to ride.
I can't ride the same wave as the next surfer. I have to pick.
Yeah, and by the way it doesn't give you the advantage and you have to create a level of asymmetry, you know, in the market where if the market's going a certain way you have to add value in a different angle so that it then provides a very clear insertion point for you to come in. Like for example, if you look at what's happening with India right now, there's, you know, the progress that's being made around language models because if you think about the number of dialects and number of languages and then also... So the notion of like, you know, like most people in India don't speak English or Hindi, they speak Hinglish and that might be a very different set of model training kind of things that be done, it's its own language.
And so I feel like those are the kind of things that can be meaningfully additive when India participates and I think they're doing that. Like I'm very impressed with, I mean, what the prime minister has laid out as his vision. I think what the private sector is doing, what, you know, ministers like Ashwini Vaishnaw and others have actually done to really propel this thing. It's very encouraging to see.
Yeah. And I think on that multilingual piece also, I think, you know, Sarvam launched their model here, for them also multilingual piece is enough and I think at some point there has to be a... If I see that multilingual foundational model focus that Sarvam and companies like that are bringing and on the other side this emphasis on healthcare and education and, you know, the humanity piece that India has, I think, prioritized, it's important that the two connect at some point to provide, as I see, personalized education.
Right, and personalized healthcare.
Because I think one of the key problems we have in India that we haven't solved fully yet is the fact that, yes, not the best education to every Indian yet.
Even if they're getting education, I'm saying not the best education that they could possibly get. And you've studied, you know, across the world, so I think you'll know what I mean. And then there's a lot of rote learning often, for example, that we get stuck with here. And the same way on healthcare, right? I think that can unlock the capacity of Indians to really partake in the wave also.
In addition, of course, creating great companies maybe in that space that can then go possibly global or at least around the world to some.
Yeah. And there's such a huge population demographic advantage that India has right now.
Especially given what's happening around the world with aging populations like that. That's one of the superpowers of India.
Yeah. Yeah. That's true. The number of people below 30 that are in the workforce that are going to have a STEM background.
So Jitu, as we look at, you know, we've of course the summit has helped us look at a lot of what India can do and of course it's the India AI Impact Summit looking at how AI is shaping up around the world, but I know that you also have recently hosted an AI summit at Cisco.
And I want to ask you more about that because I think one of the key things for any country has to be that you understand what you can do well in the context of what's happening maybe at the cutting edge globally.
Right. So that you are, as you are rightly saying, building on top of what's already happening and not just maybe building off in a silo. So help us understand, like one, tell us about the summit, how that went. You pulled it off as a company here. Of course, it's been a whole of government, whole of country effort to pull off the India AI. So, tell us about the Cisco AI summit and maybe share with us some of the key takeaways, some of the key things that maybe got talked about there.
That maybe have not been the primary focus here.
Sure. And let me actually start by just congratulating the Indian government and specifically Minister Vaishnaw as well as, you know, Prime Minister Modi on like the caliber and scale of this summit. Like I don't think anyone has seen 250,000 people in an AI summit yet. And so that level of scale was just mindboggling, right?
And you know, I think what I've loved also, I'll second that for a second with the point that I think even for the top AI tech executives from around the world, I think it's a real sort of rubber hits the road type moment. I hope that when you see the masses of people that are interested in AI products, AI solutions, for them to visually see that ultimately actually this is the group of people we have to build this for and not sort of be living in our own, let's say, Silicon Valley lab silo mentality. It's a phenomenal coalition and, you know, last night we were with the prime minister and, you know, there's a round table of 28 or so CEOs and it was just very encouraging to see everyone wanting to work together to make sure that we can further the cause. And I think the level of strategic direction that the prime minister was kind of laying out was heartwarming to see. So I feel very proud as a person of Indian origin to see how far we've come.
On the AI summit that we did back in San Francisco, we did that on February 3rd. The goal was there was to make sure that we can have some of the tough conversations and not have it be just a product pitch, you know. And so what we did is we opened up with Sam Altman and then there was Marc Andreessen and there was Fei-Fei and, you know, a bunch of senior executives from Google and Demis Hassabis and, you know, Kevin Scott from Microsoft and on and on. And then we ended with Jensen. And the purpose of that was largely to say, you know, can you cover the full stack from silicon all the way to the agent and the application and what are the things that need to happen in each layer of the stack.
Yeah. So that we can see progress being made and that the constraints and impediments can be overcome because right now if you think about it, you know, there's while there's a lot of possibility for AI, there's also a lot of kind of constraint in areas like infrastructure. We don't have enough power, we don't have enough compute, we don't have enough network, you know, bandwidth or memory capacity in the world to satiate the needs of AI. I think there's a trust deficit that's a pretty profound one where people don't trust these systems, they're not going to use them. And the third one then is around this notion of a context gap or a data gap where if you think about you and me and how many tokens, trillions of tokens of context we absorb every day, okay, so that it shapes our thinking. In the absence of that absorption of that context, we would not be as effective at what we're doing.
No, that's right. An agent is going to be the same way. You have to make sure that you feed it context and if you don't feed it context, it's not going to do well. But you have to create the apparatus to feed it context in the right way. So big learnings from that event were, I would say, three big learnings that came out for me. First one is there's a capabilities overhang. The innovation line is almost a vertical line at this point. The exponential is a vertical line. And part of the reason for that is modern software development has completely flipped now to being fully automated.
And as a result, it's only going to compound in speed. So your capabilities are growing at a much faster rate than an organization's ability to absorb the change that's happening. That's my first learning.
And we have to do a bunch of things to make sure that that gap gets bridged. The second learning which goes through that is we have this tremendous amount of emphasis on a human in the loop.
Everyone talks about that and I feel like the way we should be thinking about it is flip the model and make sure that AI is in every loop because if we can have AI in every loop that will change the way that the process works and that'll change the assumptions we have when our work gets done. And then the third big realization that's come out of that is it is less about these things being productivity tools but as you move into the age of agents these are teammates that are getting augmented to our workforce.
And we have to think about accommodating those teammates. And just like it takes a human a vetting process, you know, like if you were to go look for a job, like when I look for a job at Cisco, what did they do with me? Well, the first thing they did was Chuck interviewed me. Does this person have the right skills, the right temperament, the right value system to go out and actually do the job? Number two, after that was done, they didn't just take my word. They called some references.
Check. Of course, massive background checks, some references. Exactly.
Then there was a background check. Is he a criminal? You know, has he done something wrong? And then they give you a manager. Chuck was my manager and said, 'I'm going to give you some guard rails within which you can operate.'
And I think agents have to get the same kind of things done. Like you're going to need to have a background check and you're going to need to have some references. You're going to need to have some capabilities assessment. So a model eval is the equivalent of an interview.
You know, AI supply chain is the equivalent of a background check and we have to create that apparatus for AI to actually be ingested into work.
And so those were the three big learnings I had is, you know, capabilities overhang, flip the model to AI in every loop and make sure that you can think about these as not productivity tools but as co-workers that are digital co-workers that are going to enter into the workforce that are going to work for us with us.
And you can delegate tasks and the companies that will succeed are the ones that can safely delegate tasks.
Yeah. For that agent, are we also thinking enough about how to shape their values? So, a lot of our conversation has been about, you know, what's motivating you, what's driving you, our fears, you know, your personal background, all of that, core values. And I think that's been a key question around values and ethics that people have been discussing around AI. How do you start to do that?
I think this is the central part of like the success of AI is going to be...
And in a way that's still personalized, right? Because ultimately your values versus my values versus the next person's values are very different. Even if professionally we're being trained at the same things at a Cisco, at a McKinsey or whatever, personally our values are different, but it seems that for AI agents if we have to start to somehow infuse values it's going to be hard to figure out what values, whose values.
Yeah, I think firstly you can't have it be free for all where all values are done on an individual basis because your values might be, 'I want to go out and cause harm to humans,' and not yours, but like a person's values, and that might not be the right set of values to allow to be infused into the agent, right? So the first thing is there have to be a core set of assumptions that the model has to be trained on which is they are in service of humans, not in competition with humans.
Yeah. But that's like teaching a child that you have to listen to your parents. Listen to your parents, except the child will not.
