Jeetu Patel on Driving Digital Transformation at Cisco – The View From Davos

The World Economic Forum is always a hotbed of ideas, and this year, the focus was squarely on AI 🎯

Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead caught up with Cisco’s EVP & Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel to get his thoughts on the event and his take on AI and the keys to unlocking economic growth.

Tune in as they cover:

  • Cisco’s approach to innovation and product development
  • The importance of hybrid and sovereign AI clouds & areas where Cisco can add unique value, like AI security
  • Cisco’s role working with hyperscalers and providing solutions for both training and inferencing
  • The future of work and collaboration technologies over the next 3-5 years is Agentic AI
  • Strategies for leading in a hybrid work environment
  • Jeetu Patel’s vision for the technological future of Cisco

Learn more at Cisco.

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Transcript

Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road with a View from Davos. We’re here at the World Economic Forum. WEF is an interesting melding of tech, politics, policy. We’re having a ton of conversations about AI, not unsurprisingly.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, Pat, we knew that coming into this, the big topic was going to be AI. A lot of the sort of historic trend lines. Every year there’s a theme here. And the last couple of years has been all about this kind of build out of infrastructure. This year I feel like it’s kind of like the AI ROI. People are really trying to say, how are we going to take AI and make it meaningfully drive economic growth? And so coming together with the best price performance area in the market here in Davos, more meetings, more conversations, and of course so many here on The Six Five.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And pulling AI together is no trivial matter. It takes a combination of compute, networking, data, security, and about 17 other things. And a big player in pulling this all together is Cisco. And it is our pleasure to have Jeetu here first time on The Six Five.

Jeetu Patel: How are you?

Patrick Moorhead: How you doing, buddy?

Jeetu Patel: Second time, actually.

Patrick Moorhead: Oh, second time. Okay.

Daniel Newman: We sat with Jeetu at the Partner Summit, right?

Jeetu Patel: That’s right, that’s right.

Daniel Newman: Great to see you.

Jeetu Patel: Good to see you, man.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.

Jeetu Patel: I’m actually following your workouts quite diligently on LinkedIn, so I’m inspired by what you’re doing.

Patrick Moorhead: When you had fallen as far as I, there was only one way.

Jeetu Patel: I think you’re doing pretty well. In fact, some of our executives are like, “Have you seen Patrick? He is fit.” I’m like, “I know. I feel terrible now.”

Patrick Moorhead: No, I appreciate that. But hey, let’s talk about more interesting things than my health journey and maybe a great place to start off is what have you gotten out of the World Economic Forum? We’re about at the halfway mark. Are you getting out of it what you expected?

Jeetu Patel: I think my expectations whenever I come here are super high and every year I feel like I exceed them because this is one of the few times in a year where you can meet customers from all continents and partners from all continents in a very, very short time period. And just the density of talent and brain power is so high that we’ve had a great three days and I’ve got a really exciting set of meetings today as well.

Patrick Moorhead: Excellent.

Daniel Newman: Of course, starting off here. I’m sure it’s not starting-

Patrick Moorhead: This is the most exciting-

Jeetu Patel: This is the most exciting of any of the meetings that I’ve had at Davos.

Patrick Moorhead: Eighth conversation you’ve probably had, Jeetu. You hear the kind of AI trend line and one of the things was it is a continuum. And you’ve got kind of people because maybe if you’re in our space and you’re around it, you’re like, “We’re in the middle and late stages.” But really it’s very early. And you get that when you talk to people who aren’t entrenched in tech every single day. Every company, including Cisco has sort of been on their own timeline and horizon. I feel like Cisco kind of was a little bit cautious coming in about how much you talked about AI, how much you positioned yourselves around it, while other companies maybe ran out really fast. And now it feels like you’re turning up the heat a little bit. Talk a little bit about how you’re thinking about that through your lens, Jeetu, about sort of Cisco coming out bigly, at a big event last week and really starting to really tell the story of how AI is going to change its future.

Jeetu Patel: Yeah. One of the reasons we took it slow earlier is we wanted to just be deliberate about what were meaningful areas where Cisco could add value that was unique to Cisco. And if you think about what’s happening in the industry right now, I don’t know, there’s about $225 billion spent on training.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.

Jeetu Patel: About 10 billion has been derived on the inferencing side in revenue. So there’s still a gap. And why is that gap? Because I think there’s only two types of companies in the world, ones that are going to be AI forward, what I like to call is people that know how to take advantage of AI really well. They have high dexterity with AI. And others that are going to struggle for relevance. And so the great ones, I think they want to move fast, but they’re being held back because of safety and security in AI. So that’s an area that we have really doubled down on at Cisco. And we made an announcement last week on a product called AI Defense that really helps take out the unpredictability from AI and validate models, provide visibility, make sure that you’ve enforced guardrails. And I’m looking forward to all the things that we can do to accelerate the adoption of AI. Because frankly, I think the future’s going to be agentic. There’s going to be a lot of workflows that get automated and in three to five years it’ll be very hard for us to look back because our lives will be very different because of all the advancements that we’re going to see.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So Jeetu, it’s becoming a lot clearer what your play is in the enterprise as it regards to AI. And AI Defense is just one more comprehensive easy button offering that you’re providing. But one of the untold stories is that you are very much a player within hyperscalers.

Jeetu Patel: We are.

Patrick Moorhead: Talked to Chuck about that yesterday and Dan and I sitting on your earnings calls to go through and they’re discussed. Can you talk to us a little bit more about what your play is there?

Jeetu Patel: Yeah, so I mean if you think about what we are doing right now on the hyperscaler side is specifically for training. There’s five core components needed for AI that are very essential. Right? So there’s compute, the algorithms and data, compute algorithms, data and the networking and security. Those are the five. And the way that we think about it is high performance, low latency, high energy efficient kind of networking is super important for AI. And if you don’t have that, you don’t really have AI.

And GPUs are very energy hungry. Every kilowatt of energy that you can save on the network can be given to the GPU so that they can process more. So I think there’s a lot of appetite in the market for saying give us that low latency, high performance intra GPU communication fabric. Because if you think about the amount of packets that have to move through the GPUs in a cluster, it’s a pretty high amount and every millisecond counts on those workloads. Now, by the way, that’s on the training side. On the inferencing side, I think the market’s going to be even larger. And we were talking to Jonathan Ross from Groq, and-

Daniel Newman: We’re both investors

Jeetu Patel: Yeah. Yeah. And he was, I think inferencing is probably going to be like 20 X of training, and training’s growing at a pretty fast pace. And then with test time compute with Agentic kind of workflows, you’re going to start to see more and more demand for this kind of stuff where networking and security are going to be at the core underlying fabric. And then we also do a lot on the compute side by providing enterprises with a complete box that you can go out and deploy in a turnkey way.

Daniel Newman: It’s really interesting, when I started going down that path it was sort of a choose your own adventure. These few different paths I was going to take you down now. But when you mentioned that conversation with Jonathan, we were having a kind of interesting conversation, but there really is kind of almost Apple versus Android thing going on with AI right now. Of course, Nvidia has been just a tremendous success and-

Jeetu Patel: You have to give it to Jensen.

Daniel Newman: Absolutely.

Jeetu Patel: He’s done such an amazing job.

Daniel Newman: Absolutely. But the proprietary networking that exists inside and outside of the rack is creating this kind of really big debate over time. And Cisco obviously going to ethernet and the open standard. And when we talked to Jonathan, talking about how they’ve developed protocol and then they’re using like 25 gig networking and switching and they’re creating this amazing throughput and inference. How does that kind of play out in your mind, the sort of proprietary open? What do you see in the future there?

Jeetu Patel: Well, we think in the long-term, ethernet will be the standard that people will use for communication. And so we are betting on it. We’ve actually been quite consistent in that point of view for the past few years. And I think it’s going to be good for the industry. But I have to give a lot of credit to every player in this market. And I think NVIDIA has done a fantastic job of not only providing the infrastructure, but leading the way and also sharing what kind of applications are going to be very useful in the market. So we are partners with NVIDISA, we work very closely with them, and we want to continue to make sure that that partnership only enhances over time.

Patrick Moorhead: So the W in WEF is World.

Jeetu Patel: World.

Patrick Moorhead: We’re at a multinational event here and there’s a lot of discussion, particularly with all of the different countries and governments here as a need for a hybrid AI sovereign cloud. And I’m curious how Cisco is supporting this notion of a sovereign AI cloud and the hybrid bonus points, meaning going from on-prem to the public cloud.

Jeetu Patel: Look, I think there’s going to be some level of interest that people are going to have in one repatriation of data centers back to the private cloud with AI. And that’s going to happen, and that’s where we have our enterprise offerings like AI pods that we announced at Partner Summit in November that are really picking up in demand. I was just with the government minister of a country, of a state in the country, and they were talking about exactly the same thing, which is they want to make sure that cybersecurity is handled. They want to make sure that data sovereignty is actually something that they keep in mind and they want to be the leader in AI. And that’s actually very common in any of the government kind of meetings that I have been to in the past couple of days. It’s a very common theme, and I think that’s great for Cisco because we’ve got all the infrastructure for making data sovereignty a reality, making sure that you’ve got the right level of security architecture in place and doing that with the level of scale that I think a lot of companies struggle with sometimes.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, makes sense.

Daniel Newman: So Jeetu, as we sort of wind down, I want to ask you a little bit more of the human side of implementation. In the end, you guys build great products, but our data, we did a survey, we talked to 213 CEOs of companies with more than a billion dollars in revenue, and we were trying to understand their AI success stories. We partnered with Kearney, the big management consulting firm on this. And basically the answers and the outcomes of it was that digital companies are really struggling to actually get the people to buy in to this AI transformation. Same as every other, whether it’s been big data, solo mobile, whether it’s been cloud or whether it was the digital transformation. Kind of interesting is you’re having these conversations with governments, you’re having conversations with large enterprises and smaller businesses because of course Cisco serves them all. How are you sort of talking about or hearing about the part of getting the buy-in because the tech works, it’s evolving, but the tech works. The buy-in seems to always be the hard part.

Jeetu Patel: Yeah, I think the way that we’ve actually seen this evolve is there’s getting to be more and more of a recognition that the composition of the workforce is fundamentally going to change. And what I mean by that is today 100% of the workforce is humans.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.

Jeetu Patel: I think tomorrow you’re going to have AI agents, you’re going to have robotics, you’re going to have humanoids that are going to actually augment the workforce. And as that happens, your architecture will fundamentally need to change across everything, across connectivity, across security, across the way in which your workflows operate. And getting very specific about the workflows that you want to automate rather than just keeping it at a theoretical level, I think is very important. So for example, there’s a huge amount of appetite without that much skepticism, around 90 to 95% of first-line calls that organizations take from their contact centers are going to be through a virtual agent first. That’ll actually fully get resolved and only 5% get escalated. And that’ll probably happen within a year to two.

Patrick Moorhead: Interesting.

Jeetu Patel: So those are the kind of use cases, software development, software engineering, you will be able to buy in 2025 software engineers to augment your existing developer workforce that’ll be able to do full jobs that you can say, go build me an e-commerce application. It’ll go and come back to you in a few hours and give you an application with test time compute where it’s iterating behind the scenes. And those are the kinds of things I think that we’re getting to convergence where people are saying these are just going to happen.

Daniel Newman: From months to minutes, it sounds like in terms of the efficiencies and growth we can get, Jeetu. Thank you so much for joining us on The six five. Good to see you. Have a wonderful rest of your Davos and we’ll do this again soon. And thank you everybody for being part of The Six Five. We’re On the Road with a View from Davos. So much going on here. Hit subscribe. Join us for all of our coverage here at the World Economic Forum. For this episode though, we got to say goodbye. We’ll see you later.

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