At Sierra Ventures' 21st Annual CXO Summit, Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco, sat down with Mark Fernandes, Sierra Ventures, for a conversation on "The Agentic Enterprise: From Copilots to Coworkers."
Speaking to a room of Fortune 2000 CIOs and CTOs, Jeetu argued that we are heading into an agent super cycle. How fast enterprises get there depends less on the models than on two things leaders control: security and culture.
Personal agents will be the next ChatGPT moment
ChatGPT took off because everyone, not just technologists, had a story about using it. Jeetu expects personal agents to follow the same path. Most people still haven't seen an agent take a task from request to done without hand-holding. Once they do, consumer adoption will create the pull. Cisco has already given an agent to each of its roughly 90,000 employees.
Jeetu admitted he expected to be critical of an internal tool, and instead it changed the rhythm and pace of how his teams work. For enterprises, employees will arrive with consumer-grade agent experiences and expect the same at work.
Speed up security instead of slowing down AI
The question isn't whether to slow AI down. It's how fast you can make it safe. Productivity gains depend on trusted delegation, meaning you can hand work to an agent and be confident about what it will do. Without that trust, one failure can end a business.
That makes access the key decision. An agent can only deliver as much value as the access you give it, but too much access is where the risk lives. Jeetu compared agents to teenagers: "They are supremely intelligent, they have no fear of consequence, and they exercise bad judgment far more frequently than you and I would like." It is hard to tell an agent that has been manipulated from one that sincerely believes it's following instructions, so reviews at design time aren't enough. Guardrails have to run live, across the whole environment.
The same urgency applies to basic hygiene. The gap between finding a vulnerability and fixing it has become dangerous, and too many organizations keep hardware running past end of life to stretch budgets. Jeetu called that a national security risk, whoever made the hardware.
Culture is harder than technology, so lead from the top
At Cisco, AI adoption didn't spread from the bottom up. It had to be mandated. Jeetu set the goal publicly on CNBC: half a dozen products written entirely with AI by the end of the year, and no legacy code within 24 months. Then he asked his team to deliver. Using AI was not up for debate. How to implement it was.
The pushback was about timing. Engineers judge tools by what works today, but anything that isn't working now will probably work before a two-year planning cycle is over. The turning point came when one of his most skeptical engineering leaders reported that his team had refactored 500,000 lines of code down to 120,000 in about three weeks, and that it was already running in production.
That same leader raised the real concern, which was jobs, and Jeetu addressed it directly. Employees got generous token access to build fluency first, before anyone worried about efficiency. They also got a clear message: the bigger risk to your job is refusing to use AI. Cisco also cut layers of middle management in favor of builders, so people would tie their identity to what they ship rather than how many people they manage.
Extend trust to competitors
Trust matters between companies too. Customers expect their vendors' products to work together, and zero-sum thinking breaks that expectation. Cisco's decision to let Microsoft Teams run on its conference room devices made customers happier and grew the business. Jeetu's advice for any difficult partnership is to approach the conflict with curiosity rather than judgment, assume good intent, and work back from what the customer needs. In security especially, the only real enemy is the attacker.