Never Fight a Megatrend: Cisco’s Jeetu Patel

We talk a lot about AI being overhyped. Today's guest believes it's not. Continue listening to learn how his point is connected to tech infrastructure and security. I'm Jeetu Patel from Cisco, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI. Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 12 seasons of podcast episodes. On each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Hi, listeners. Thanks for joining us again. Today, I'm talking with Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco. Jeetu, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me, Sam. It's great to be here. Well, as we talk, Cisco equipment is probably behind 90 percent of the infrastructure that we're using, but some of the listeners may not be aware of all that Cisco does. So let's start off there. Jeetu, can you give us a background of Cisco and in particular your role? Sure. I'll start in reverse order. I run products at Cisco, so all the products that you use from Cisco, whether it be networking products, whether it be security products, whether it be data products or collaboration products, those typically are ones that I'm in charge of building and taking to market. Of course, we're the very, very capable team. Essentially, the way you should think about Cisco is we are the critical infrastructure company for the AI era. So all of the plumbing that's required to make sure that people can connect, people can stay secure while they're connected, and people can make sure that they have the data platform. Those are the things that we provide to the market. I saw a quote from you say, well, think of us as the picks and shovels during the AI gold rush era. For listeners, you may not be aware, there's a famous or infamous statement that the people who made money in the gold rush were people who sold picks and shovels to the miners, individual miners, some of them made it big, but some of them did not. And I think your analogy is spot on there. Yeah. You know, one of the things that you find when you go through these kind of massive, what I would call disruptive platform shifts, where we've all been going down a certain path with a certain set of assumptions, and then the assumptions change because a whole new set of technologies emerge, which is what AI is. What you find is the infrastructure that's required to go out and run those technologies needs to be rethought and reimagined. And anytime there's any one of these major platform shifts, the infrastructure providers tend to make out pretty well, because you have to change the entire plumbing of the apparatus that's going to be used. So if you think about when automobiles were built, you now need to have roads, and you need to have expressways, and you need to have traffic lights, and you need to have a whole system in place for how automobiles actually get integrated into society. So it's not just the automobile, but everything around it needs to change. And if you think about AI right now, these data centers where these digital workers are going to live, they have to be completely reimagined because the current data center does not have the power availability and the compute requirements and the network bandwidth to be able to fulfill and satiate the needs of what an AI system would need. So you have to kind of rethink and reimagine and, as they call in technical terms, re-rack the data centers, because there's racks and racks of computers and network and searching gear that actually have to be cooled in a certain way and so on and so forth. And so that entire shift is what we are in the midst of. And Cisco is a natural benefactor of it, because we provide the infrastructure for the AI era. So some of the analogies you're making, we talked about the gold rush, we talked about the Internet, we talked about cars. Is artificial intelligence at that level of big deal or not? I think it might be bigger. And the way I've seen these kind of shifts happen, imagine if amazon.com got built in the 1600s, it would be an epically failed company because you didn't have the Internet and you didn't have the underlying infrastructure on top of which Amazon could be built because you didn't have the shipping and the logistics infrastructure and the Internet and all those pieces. In a similar vein, with AI, we have the benefit of having all of the infrastructure that's been built out to date. And so when you have something that's built taking advantage of all of these things, by definition, each one of these subsequent major transformative waves tends to be bigger an impact than the previous ones, just because it was built on top of shoulders of giants of the previous innovations that have happened. And so I would say this is probably the most consequential set of inventions that we will have seen in our lifetime for sure and probably arguably in humanity. But the thing to keep in mind is the pace of innovation and the slope at which it happens actually makes it impossible to predict what's going to happen three years from now, because we've compressed the time, scientific progress will probably compound by 1000X. And so you've compressed this time scale where it's actually, we're in a warped situation right now, where humans can't make sense of this because everything's moving so fast. Hey folks, Steven Johnson here, co-founder of Notebook LM. As an author, I've always been obsessed with how software could help organize ideas and make connections. So we built Notebook LM as an AI first tool for anyone trying to make sense of complex information. Upload your documents and Notebook LM instantly becomes your personal expert, uncovering insights and helping you brainstorm. Try it at notebooklm.google.com.