Cisco President and Chief Product Office Jeetu Patel Talks New AI Tool for Cybersecurity

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Annmarie Hordern** (0:07)
Cybersecurity concerns mounting after advanced models from OpenAI went rogue, hacking tech from Hugging Face in a first of its kind incident. Cisco taking a head on approach and finding a brand new AI tool designed to find and address weak points in software. The Cisco president and chief product officer, Jeetu Patel, a good friend of this program over the years, joins us now for more.

**Jonathan Ferro** (0:28)
Jeetu, good to see you, sir. Great to catch up.

**Jeetu Patel** (0:31)
Jonathan, great to see you. How are you?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:32)
Let's get into this issue. I'm okay. I'm always nervous.

**Jonathan Ferro** (0:34)
You know I am.

**Annmarie Hordern** (0:35)
And then I see those stories like this week and it makes me even more nervous.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:38)
I've been asking you this for a while.

**Jonathan Ferro** (0:39)
Can you tell us, do you think these developments will expose vulnerabilities or over time, just make these systems more resilient?

**Jeetu Patel** (0:49)
I think that the reality is that will be a little bit of both because what you'll start to see happen is these agents are getting to be long running agents that when they're given a task, sometimes they just keep going down the task for this thing that happened with OpenAI and Hugging Face. Basically, what happened is all that the agent was given was a goal.
It figured out a way to get out of the secure enclave and go out and make sure that it actually stole the model weight someplace else and stole the test. What you can start to see happening right now is we have to one, be prepared that an agent might behave out of the bounds of what you think is normal, and two, when it starts behaving that way, you have to be able to intercept it and be prepared that that behavior could be pretty bad for you. So it's something that we're just going to have to live in this new world where as agents mature, we will have to figure out a way to intercept them and they're not behaving the way that we deem it to be appropriate.

**Annmarie Hordern** (1:53)
Jeetu, I remember when IBM came out last week and they're talking about the change in focus and the wholesale shift towards cybersecurity earlier this year as we learned about mythos and fable and how that affected their earnings. I'm just wondering from your perspective more broadly, if you can sort of quantify or characterize just how much interest in cybersecurity has picked up and really concentrate the focus of CEOs around the world.

**Jeetu Patel** (2:18)
I think right now if you think about what's happening in AI, there are two areas that are of material concern for organizations. Number one is cybersecurity, number two is the cost of tokens. And these are both things that most organizations are concerned about because if you have an agent start to misbehave, are you prepared as an organization to be able to intercept that and make sure that your organization is safe from the exploits that the agent might be able to go out and create for you?
And so it's a very, very important area of the business. It's something that actually prevents some organizations from leading in all the way with AI. So we have to make sure that cybersecurity and the safety of AI is pretty important and dealt with it with appropriate level of emphasis.
And then the second one is the cost of tokens. It's these cost of tokens can accelerate, these agents can, they're running 24 by 7 And if you don't monitor and observe the consumption of tokens, and when you start to see an agent go rogue, be able to put some boundary conditions around the agent, you could actually start having some very big bills that you hadn't forecasted for. So those are the two areas that most organizations are thinking about right now, as they make their deployments with an AI much more kind of broadly deployed.

**Annmarie Hordern** (3:42)
It's a really interesting view on token maxing and why we're seeing a shift to token rationalization. I'm just wondering Jeetu, if you think that the renewed focus on cybersecurity has taken some budget away from exploring ways to become more efficient, other deployments of artificial intelligence.

**Jeetu Patel** (4:02)
I think it's most organizations have always had the balance that they've played where, for example, right now, there's more emphasis and more budgets being spent on AI and there's also a lot of budget being spent on cybersecurity. Of course, at some point in time, there's a finite amount of dollars that are there in IT that come from somewhere, but I think organizations, what they're doing at this point in time, at least, is making sure that they've learned the hard way from the previous kind of episodes like COVID, where if you don't have enough amount of forward investment in tech, then you could actually be put in a world of hurt as a company, so you have to make sure that you're forward investing in some of these areas.