AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel

**Jeetu Patel** (0:00)
Survival of humanity depends on a successful AI. Birth rates are going down. If you have 60% of your population where you don't have enough people to take care of them, that could cause a lot of human suffering. When I got this new job, there is zero chance I would have been able to do it if AI wasn't there, because I didn't know anything about so many domains that we were in.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:17)
A lot of companies are trying to adjust to this new world.

**Jeetu Patel** (0:20)
You have to know the difference between a megatrend and hype cycle. When there's a megatrend, don't fight it. AI is a megatrend. One of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:30)
To turn Cisco from an older, slower, more traditional enterprise to a very AI forward company, this is very difficult to do.

**Jeetu Patel** (0:37)
AI is moving so fast. One of the things I tell my team is, fast forward six months from now, get prepared for that world.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
You manage 30,000 people.

**Jeetu Patel** (0:44)
Every management book that you read will tell you, praise in public, criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. What you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:59)
What's something that you wish you'd known before taking on this role?

**Jeetu Patel** (1:02)
Stamina trumps intellect. It's very important to have smart people, but you can become smart if you have curiosity and hunger and staying power and persistence. You can't teach hunger.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:15)
Today, my guest is Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer and President at Cisco. Cisco is not a brand that mostly people think about when they think about AI, but not only are they a massive part of the AI infrastructure build out that is happening right now all over the world. What Jeetu has achieved internally at Cisco in terms of transforming their culture and ways of working to be AI first is something that most big company leaders only dream about. Jeetu is also an incredible human with so much warmth and wisdom to share. I am very excited to be sharing his story. Don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lennys newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. Applications break in all kinds of ways. Crashes, slowdowns, regressions, and the stuff that you only see once real users show up. Sentry catches it all. See what happened where and why, down to the commit that introduced the error, the developer who shipped it, and the exact line of code all in one connected view. I have definitely tried the five tabs and slack thread approach to debugging. This is better. Sentry shows you how the request moved, what ran, what slowed down, and what users saw. Seer, Sentry's AI debugging agent, takes it from there. It uses all of that Sentry context to tell you the root cause, suggest a fix, and even opens a PR for you. It also reviews your PRs and flags any breaking changes with fixes ready to go. Try Sentry and Seer for free at sentry.io/lenny and use code Lenny for $100 in Sentry credits. That's sentry.io/lenny.
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