The Critical Infrastructure Behind the AI Boom | Cisco CPO Jeetu Patel

Show Notes

AI is accelerating at a breakneck pace, but model quality isn’t the only constraint we face.. There are major infrastructure requirements, energy needs, security, and data pipelines to run AI at scale. This week on Chain of Thought, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel joins host Conor Bronsdon to reveal what it actually takes to build the critical foundation for the AI era.

Jeetu breaks down the three bottlenecks he sees holding AI back today:

 • Infrastructure limits: not enough power, compute, or data center capacity

 • A trust deficit: non-deterministic models powering systems that must be predictable

 • A widening data gap: human-generated data plateauing while machine data explodes

Jeetu then shares how Cisco is tackling these challenges through secure AI factories, edge inference, open multi-model architectures, and global partnerships with Nvidia, G42, and sovereign cloud providers. Jeetu also explains why he thinks enterprises will soon rely on thousands of specialized models — not just one — and how routing, latency, cost, and security shape this new landscape.

Conor and Jeetu also explore high-performance leadership and team culture, discussing building high-trust teams, embracing constructive tension, staying vigilant in moments of success, and the personal experiences that shaped Jeetu’s approach to innovation and resilience.

If you want a clearer picture of the global AI infrastructure race, how high-level leaders are thinking about the future, and what it all means for enterprises, developers, and the future of work, this conversation is essential.

Chapters:

00:00 – Welcome to Chain of Thought

0:48 - AI and Jobs: Beyond the Hype

6:15 - The Real AI Opportunity: Original Insights

10:00 - Three Critical AI Constraints: Infrastructure, Trust, and Data

16:27 - Cisco's AI Strategy and Platform Approach

19:18 - Edge Computing and Model Innovation

22:06 - Strategic Partnerships: Nvidia, G42, and the Middle East

29:18 - Acquisition Strategy: Platform Over Products

32:03 - Power and Infrastructure Challenges

36:06 - Building Trust Across Global Partnerships

38:03 - US vs. China: The AI Infrastructure Race

40:33 - America's Venture Capital Advantage

42:06 - Acquisition Philosophy: Strategy First

45:45 - Defining Cisco's True North

48:06 - Mission-Driven Innovation Culture

50:15 - Hiring for Hunger, Curiosity, and Clarity

56:27 - The Power of Constructive Conflict

1:00:00 - Career Lessons: Continuous Learning

1:02:24 - The Email Question

1:04:12 - Joe Tucci's Four-Column Exercise

1:08:15 - Building High-Trust Teams

1:10:12 - The Five Dysfunctions Framework

1:12:09 - Leading with Vulnerability

1:16:18 - Closing Thoughts and Where to Connect

Connect with Jeetu Patel:

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeetupatel/ 

X(twitter) – https://x.com/jpatel41

Cisco - https://www.cisco.com/

Connect with ConorBronsdon  

Substack – https://conorbronsdon.substack.com/ 

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/

X (twitter) – https://x.com/ConorBronsdon

What is Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering?

AI is reshaping infrastructure, strategy, and entire industries. Host Conor Bronsdon talks to the engineers, founders, and researchers building breakthrough AI systems about what it actually takes to ship AI in production, where the opportunities lie, and how leaders should think about the strategic bets ahead.

Chain of Thought translates technical depth into actionable insights for builders and decision-makers. New episodes weekly.

Conor Bronsdon is an angel investor in AI and dev tools, Technical Ecosystem Lead at Modular, and previously led growth at AI startups Galileo and LinearB.

Disclaimer: All views, opinions and statements expressed on this account are solely my own and are made in my personal capacity. They do not reflect, and should not be construed as reflecting, the views, positions, or policies of Modular. This account is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Modular in any way.

[0:00] Jeetu Patel:
The adversaries and the threat actors that cause cybersecurity attacks or cyber attacks have the exact same tools now that you and I do, Conor. And they can use those tools to get far more sophisticated and far more at scale in systematically attacking society and the critical infrastructure of society.

[0:24] Conor Bronsdon:
Welcome back to Chain of Thought, everyone. I am your host, Conor Bronzeden. Today, we are discussing a topic that is on every enterprise leader's mind. How to build the infrastructure to support AI at scale? And how do you do it securely? We have the perfect guest to help us understand this challenge, and that is Jitu Patel.

[0:43] Jeetu Patel:
Jitu is president and chief product officer at Cisco. Thank you so much for joining me. It's such a pleasure to be on your show, and I love the name of your podcast. Thank you so much.

[0:53] Conor Bronsdon:
Should've been a thought. That's so so creative. I love it. Really, really glad to hear that. We we really try to take that lesson too from LLMs and say, okay, we're not gonna come in with a predisposed notion of of what this conversation is gonna be, you know, what our opinion is, but instead, let's work through it together. So let's maybe start with a viewpoint that I know is important to you and something you've been quite vocal about from what I've seen, the relationship between AI and jobs.

[1:21] Conor Bronsdon:
There's obviously a lot of anxiety right now. People are worried that AI is going to replace them, and some AI influencers have pushed this narrative with AGI, artificial general intelligence. And some of us is, you know, hype for fundraising, but really what it means is, oh, hey, we're all gonna be out of a job soon, or you all are gonna be out of a job soon. But you have really taken a different stance. You've been bullish on the idea that AI isn't about replacing jobs,

[1:48] Conor Bronsdon:
but instead about making our work better. Can you walk us through why you believe that? I I believe in that because

[1:56] Jeetu Patel:
I feel like we should not underestimate the the the human mind. You know? Like, we've thousands of years have gone by. There's been bunch of technology shifts that have happened, and humans have continued to find a way to stay relevant during each one of these kind of disruptions. And, you know, if you think about what are humans really good at doing, humans are amazing at

[2:25] Jeetu Patel:
gut instinct, intuition, ability to be able to make decisions within complete data, having empathy. These are all things that are really hard to have a machine get trained on. I I it's it's a very interesting industry strategy that transpired where the industry took an intentional, you know, approach of making AI very skeuomorphic in nature. Right? And so it was like

[2:57] Jeetu Patel:
every single thing was equated to a human rather than being equated to tooling that humans use. And I think, like, you know, there's a very eloquent argument that Jensen has that, hey, this is not this is not a tool, it's work. I actually like the way that he frames that, but I do feel like level one maturity that we would have is AI is going to take our jobs of thinking. Like, just pure maturity of thinking spectrum.

[3:30] Jeetu Patel:
Level one maturity is AI is going take our job. Level two maturity is someone that uses AI better than me is more likely to take my job than AI taking my job. And that is a risk, to be fair. That is a real risk, right? And then there's mitigations to that risk that we should talk about. And then level three maturity is when people realize in the next few years, it's going to be really hard to imagine me doing my job or me getting my job done without AI.

[3:59] Jeetu Patel:
And this is not even a crazy concept. Like, the spreadsheets came out, and everyone thought that every finance person was gonna lose their job. And now you can't get a finance job without understanding the spreadsheet. I don't think that AI is going be any different on that dimension. We will not be able to get our jobs done without AI. So then the question is, what is AI

[4:26] Jeetu Patel:
good at? One way to think about this is there are a bunch of jobs that we just don't have time to do that we can actually farm out to AI to get done. That's gonna be the first category of jobs we'll give to AI. The second thing is there's gonna be a bunch of things that AI is better than humans are doing, you know, which is like, you know, crunching data of large volumes, making sure that you can actually get aggregate the insight from that

[4:52] Jeetu Patel:
AI is going to be better at doing that than a human would do. And then the third one is jobs that humans can't do that only AI can do. And so I feel like there's on each side, humans are going to be good at a lot of things. AI is going to be good at a lot of things. And when you put them together, that's when the magic happens. And I think it's a false narrative to say humans are going to be this is the end of creative contribution of humanity in society.

[5:19] Jeetu Patel:
We're going be sitting on a beach, staring in the ocean, and that's all we're going to be doing for the rest of life. And AI is going to do everything for us. I just feel like that's jumping the gun a little too much. And so I find it to be a very kind of optimistic feature from the dimension of and I'm not delusional about it. I think there's risks to AI, but the

[5:41] Jeetu Patel:
risk of all jobs going away, I think, is de minimis. Now, what I think will happen is some jobs will go away, all jobs will get reconfigured, and entirely new industries will get created. We should think about that framing as we go into this market. And I think it'd be a far more productive framing rather than the nervous frenzy of everyone worrying that AI is gonna have the entire

[6:10] Jeetu Patel:
corpus of humanity not be able to be employable for the rest of time.

[6:15] Conor Bronsdon:
I I think that seems exaggerated to me. I completely agree. No. I I'm right there with you. In my mind, what we've done is we've compressed the need to keep learning so that you have to especially learn based off of what's changing in your role currently and the different tools that are coming in. And I think that exacerbates the fear for a lot of folks because

[6:37] Conor Bronsdon:
it used to be you could learn some over, you know, a twenty, thirty year career, and you'd be fine over time. But now the pace of change is much more rapid with AI tooling coming in, and there's this large wave, particularly in things like software engineering, other disciplines where you're seeing, you know, the way code is generated completely change, or even just like how I triage my email is changing.

[6:59] Conor Bronsdon:
But you've always, if you were gonna excel at your work over a long period of time, you need to be able to keep learning and keep evolving. And I think now people are being pressed to do that more with the AI wave.

[7:12] Jeetu Patel:
I think the compression of time at which you have to get you know, the half life of anything is compressing quite dramatically, and that can cause nervous energy. And that's actually very, very legitimate. On the other hand, I don't think the storage of knowledge in our heads is going to be the currency of the future. And so if knowledge and intelligence is abundantly available,

[7:46] Jeetu Patel:
what's going to be the unique nuance that can differentiate one human from the other is how can you make sure that you you get that knowledge extracted from AI with the right questions? And so asking the right questions, learning to learn fast, those are skills that are going to be far more important for my 14 year old daughter to learn than just, you know, cramming a bunch of knowledge and memorizing it, which is something that I feel like, you know, the Internet was the first phase of that, but now it's like

[8:20] Jeetu Patel:
AI is the second phase. The thing that I think is grossly underestimated about AI, and this is an area that I don't think people are talking about enough and they're not thinking about enough, is right now we think of AI as an aggregation mechanism for the corpus of data that's available in the world. So it's like, I'm going to go out and train my models with all the data that's available,

[8:42] Jeetu Patel:
and then I'm going to be able to get a succinct answer for a question I ask based on the data that's all available. I think that, and that's going to get me productive. That that's the current kind of simplistic promise that's delivered. I feel like that's, that's like 1% of the benefit. 99% of the benefit is going to come from original insights will get generated

[9:06] Jeetu Patel:
that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge that allow us to dream about solving problems that we had deemed unsolvable up until now. And that will then give us a whole new set of possibilities on things we can do for tackling important issues in society. You know, longevity of life, quality of life, curing of disease, you know, ending poverty, you know, kind

[9:38] Jeetu Patel:
of helping cure the climate crisis. All of these are kind of gonna be done far better with AI coming up with original insights because humans had not thought of it. And that to me is an exciting future that all of us should be stoked about rather than being nervous of because we will be able to solve problems. Now, what should we be nervous of? What's worth being nervous about is

[10:04] Jeetu Patel:
you've got, you know, like a the the adversaries and the threat actors that cause cybersecurity attacks or cyber attacks have the exact same tools now that you and I do, Conor. And they can use those tools to get far more sophisticated and and far more at scale in systematically attacking society and the critical infrastructure of society. And so what we will have to do is make sure that we

[10:36] Jeetu Patel:
we completely accept the fact that safety and security is a big risk, and we have to mitigate that risk. Because in the absence of that getting mitigated, I think we you know, there'd be a lot of harm that's caused in in humanity.

[10:52] Conor Bronsdon:
I love the thoughtfulness of this perspective, and it's clear that it's also impacting how you're approaching product development at Cisco. Because I know Cisco has a product called AI Defense that is trying to solve exactly this problem. You've published research about DeepSeek and other frontier reasoning models looking at security risks.

[11:11] Jeetu Patel:
What do you see as the most pressing AI security threats that we need to be paying attention to? So in the land of security, let me actually zoom out for a second and say, in in this world of AI, what are the impediments that could actually hold AI back? And I think there's three big areas that could hold AI back. There's more than three, but there's three that we can at at Cisco, we can we can squarely actually make sure that we can make a positive contribution to. The first one

[11:39] Jeetu Patel:
is an infrastructure constraint. There is just not enough power, compute, network bandwidth, and data center capacity to go satiate the needs of AI. And the constraint for infrastructure is directly correlated to a company and a country's ability to to have intelligence. Infrastructure is the input. Intelligence is the output. And by the way, all things being equal,

[12:09] Jeetu Patel:
any company or any country is gonna be better with more intelligence than less intelligence. Needs more intelligence. So the first constraint is infrastructure. The second big constraint is a trust deficit. And what I mean by a trust deficit is these systems that AI is built on, these models, are by definition nondeterministic in nature, which means that they're unpredictable. But we are building

[12:35] Jeetu Patel:
highly predictable applications, or we're wanting to build highly predictable applications on top of a foundation, which is, by definition, unpredictable. So we have to make sure that we can solve that problem effectively by saying, do I have visibility on what data is going in? Can I actually jailbreak this model algorithmically through a red teaming process that's algorithmic, not

[13:03] Jeetu Patel:
And once I found a way to jailbreak a model, because it doesn't work the way that I expected it to work in certain categories in certain areas, I should dynamically at runtime be able to have runtime enforcement guardrails be put on it? If I can do that, then anyone who's a developer, anyone who's building an agent, anyone who's building an application on top of a model

[13:26] Jeetu Patel:
is, by definition, going to not have to worry about building a security stack because all they'll have to worry about is coming up with the next best idea, and we will take care of the security because we will actually do that piece of it for them. You can innovate fearlessly. So that's the second big constraint is a trust deficit. If you don't have safety and security, right, people are not going to use the system. So safety and security become a prerequisite for adoption.

[13:54] Jeetu Patel:
And then the third area is a data gap where right now, if you think about it, most models, the issue that people had with scaling laws was they thought that at some point in time, they're going to run out of data, which was actually true. You're running out of human generated data publicly available on the Internet. However, there is plenty of evidence now that's starting to build up that synthetic data is starting to show very efficacious

[14:27] Conor Bronsdon:
kind of outcomes for AI models. Right? It's working great in post training. Just talked to Maxime Lebon at all Liquid

[14:35] Jeetu Patel:
they're doing to do their post training all they're to set up the liquid doing. Models. That's That's Then the second thing that's happening is machine data, which is data from applications and agents. And the more you have for every human, if you have 10 agents or 100 agents, the amount of machine data on activity that gets generated in logs, metrics, events, traces,

[14:58] Jeetu Patel:
all of those things is currently time series data that is not effectively utilized by AI models for doing things like detecting infrastructure stability, predicting infrastructure outage, you know, making sure that you can prevent a breach from occurring. All of those things is where machine data can be hugely beneficial. And so these three constraints, infrastructure,

[15:24] Jeetu Patel:
trust deficit, and a data gap, are all three turns out that Cisco can be squarely in the middle of and really help our customers out. And those customers could be public sector. They could be private sector. And essentially, what it's doing is it's helping our customers generate tokens with the lowest amount of kilowatt power of energy and the lowest amount of dollars spent

[15:49] Jeetu Patel:
because token generation ability is directly proportionate to a country and their ability to actually have economic prosperity as well as national security. And that same applies even for companies where companies can be more financially viable and have greater security posture. So I feel like those three dimensions are pretty important to understand and say,

[16:14] Jeetu Patel:
what does the market need to do to ensure that we can actually drive these constraints to a a point of, you know, where it does not become a constraint, it becomes a state of abundance. Because if you have plenty of trust, and if you have no infrastructure constraint, and if you don't have a data gap, then the potential of AI to alter the course of humanity for the positive and for the good is going to be meaningful. That's

[16:42] Jeetu Patel:
the future that we should be striving for. And by the way, that future does not happen without humans. That future requires humans to be participating.

[16:50] Conor Bronsdon:
To call back to your previous point Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of infrastructure work for us to do. There's a lot of security work for us to do to set up AI enabled work in the future. And it's been interesting to see how your perspective has really informed Cisco's decision making around product development. I know there's AI defense, as I mentioned, and then my understanding is you've actually open sourced your first security model as well,

[17:17] Jeetu Patel:
Foundation AI. Can you tell me about that decision and how that interacts with the rest of Cisco's approach here? Yeah. So on the AI defense side, just to close out on that, basically, what it is is a mechanism for us making sure that we can get visibility on what data is flowing through a model, do algorithmic red teaming and jailbreak a model using AI defense APIs, and then make sure that you can run time enforcement, apply guardrails.

[17:41] Jeetu Patel:
That's AI defense. Right? So think of it like almost like a very sophisticated version of an AI firewall. Going back to your model question, in the consumer world, I think you're going to see a few handful of foundation models be very OpenAI, Gemini, X dot AI, know, Anthropic in in in certain instances, they will all be very successful models. My guess is a few more will emerge,

[18:13] Jeetu Patel:
but you're not gonna have thousands of models on the consumer side. You will probably have a dozen that'll actually have most of the of the volume of inference. On the enterprise side, I think it's gonna be very different. You might have tens of thousands of models. And what you will have is multiple models being used in conjunction with one another with an intelligent routing layer

[18:38] Jeetu Patel:
that allows you to make sure that you can optimize your cogs, and you can make sure that certain queries go to certain models because that's costing you less from a compute resource standpoint, and then other queries might go to other models. If you look at Cursor, my guess is, I don't know for a fact, but 70% of their queries now are not going to Anthropic. They might be going to their own models,

[18:58] Jeetu Patel:
and then they might have a certain percentage that goes to Cloud. Why is that important? Because as you have more and more of these models, it's gonna get not only more cost efficient, but your efficacy of the model being able to, in a very small footprint, footprint, be be able able to to give you exactly what you're looking for in a particular domain is going to be much higher.

[19:18] Conor Bronsdon:
Latency, for example, is a concern too for a lot of folks, That's depending on the use case

[19:22] Jeetu Patel:
right. That's exactly right. So, what we discovered this pretty early, and we said, hey, look, security is an area that we care about deeply. We want to make sure that we build wouldn't it make sense for us to build our own models and security because we've got so much data. And the key over here is not to just make sure that you have infinite amounts of data.

[19:46] Jeetu Patel:
The key is to make sure that you train it on the right data, you know, and so distill it down to the just the right amount of data that you want to train it on, where the efficacy of pretraining a model that is a, you know, open source, 8,000,000,000 parameter model, we are seeing can now actually perform better than a 70,000,000,000 parameter model. And what we're also seeing is that 8,000,000,000 parameter model can be further quantized, and you can run it on a CPU on a laptop,

[20:18] Jeetu Patel:
and and it actually just has a very, very different kind of economic outcome. And so that, in my mind, not only does it solve the trust deficit, but it also solves the infrastructure constraint. And then what we're doing is we're building out products for the edge that says, okay, if you have robotics on the edge, you might need to have inferencing on the edge,

[20:38] Jeetu Patel:
to your point, because of latency. And so then we build this thing, this platform called Cisco Unified Edge, which allows you to have networking security and compute bundled in a box. So if it's a branch office or if it's a hospital or if it's a factory floor where you don't have IT staff, you can still just plug this box in, and it doesn't have wires dangling. You don't have to go out and have someone special come in to get it installed. You can manage it centrally. It's just inference

[21:05] Jeetu Patel:
plug and play on the edge so that you have the full from core to the edge inferencing capability provided by Cisco. So those are the kind of things that we've actually been spending our time building because we feel like you have to build things where there's a true pain point and a challenge. And right now, the challenges in the market tend to be around infrastructure,

[21:27] Jeetu Patel:
trust, and data. And so what we do is we take that as a core founding principle of our product ideation process and say, if we solve those things and make those abundant as a result of doing this, there's going to be a natural demand signal for it, and we'll we'll end up doing well. And we recently had our earnings for the quarter, and, you know, we had a very, very successful earnings because you're starting to see that hyperscalers and, you know, neo clouds and sovereign clouds and service providers and enterprises alike

[21:58] Jeetu Patel:
are all starting to find that, hey. It makes a lot of sense to partner with Cisco because they provide critical infrastructure for the AI era. Speaking of partnerships,

[22:06] Conor Bronsdon:
I know you've recently announced or an expanded major partnership with NVIDIA as well as partnerships with g forty two in The Middle East. Can you talk a bit about how these partnerships are helping to solve this infrastructure gap? Because as as you brought up here, we're seeing this interesting tension where both enterprises and countries are saying, I either don't have enough compute. I don't have enough energy,

[22:31] Conor Bronsdon:
or I don't have the trust I need to actually put these systems into production. Clearly, you're trying to address that challenge, and part of that is through these major partnerships. I think, in my mind, a partnership

[22:43] Jeetu Patel:
a company's willingness to partner is very indicative of the of the company's arrogance level. And the reason I say that is you can't be arrogant to think that you're gonna go out and build every single thing that's needed for a very, very large growing economy and the largest platform shift. And that means that you have to have enough humility to know that there will be overlaps

[23:10] Jeetu Patel:
between your partners. Sometimes they might be competitive in nature compared to what you might have wanted to do in an ideal world, but it is better to partner with the ecosystem and create an open ecosystem than to create a walled garden. And so that's something that we've actually thought pretty deeply about. And when I joined five years ago, one of my my big kind of

[23:34] Jeetu Patel:
convictions over here was that we have to be extremely open in our in our partnering approach. You know? So in anything that we do, even if it's a competitor, we will make sure that we extend the possibility for us partnering together. And frankly, it's worked out pretty well because the reality is I would rather grow the pie than keep trying to focus on getting the bigger piece of the same pie.

[23:57] Jeetu Patel:
And when you work with competitors and you grow the pie, everyone's happy, and this does not have to be a zero sum game. You know? And so we've partnered with NVIDIA, which we we don't have that much of a competitive overlap with them, but it it's a very synergistic partnership because they build GPUs. We build the networking, and the GPUs are you know, the way I think about this is power is the constraint,

[24:25] Jeetu Patel:
GPU is the core asset for AI, and network is the force multiplier. In the absence of the network, the GPUs can't operate. Why is that? Because it used to be that these models were small enough that they would fit in the memory of a single GPU and have the processing speed of a single GPU be able to train the model. Then what happened is the models got bigger and you needed to train

[24:51] Jeetu Patel:
it on multiple GPUs, so you created a server with four to eight GPUs. And then the model got even bigger. So you said, Oh, these servers need to be put into a rack and stacked up. And that's what I need to train the model on. And that became a rack. And then you said, oh, I need to have a set of a row of racks that need to be tied together within a data center. And now we are at the point

[25:14] Jeetu Patel:
where you're not just doing, you know, the rack networking was called scale up. The row networking was called scale out. And now what you've got is networking that goes across data centers, when two data centers that might be hundreds of kilometers apart will need to act as one coherent ultra cluster for a training room. And we have created silicon and systems

[25:38] Jeetu Patel:
and optics to be able to have two data centers with two different power draws that might be hundreds of kilometers apart operate as one giant cluster, one coherent cluster. And when you do that, that's what's called scale across. And those things are impossible to do without partnerships with others. The way I think about a partnership is if someone has more than 20 of the market and you choose not to partner with them because you want to have all the revenue to yourself because you feel like you're arrogant enough to believe you're going to build everything,

[26:15] Jeetu Patel:
then all you're doing is getting yourself excluded from that 20% of the market. You're not doing yourself any service. Economically, it makes no financial sense to not partner. I think it's a better way to live life to not just hate on people. And I think it's, most importantly, better for the customer because the customer has made an investment in company A and company B. And if we happen to be one of those two companies,

[26:42] Jeetu Patel:
it's our duty to make sure that we can actually work with the other company to get to protect our customers' investments. Because if we do that, the customer is gonna say, you know what? I wanna work with Cisco. I'm gonna work backwards and do that. And so that's why I've always felt like partnering is at the core. So there's two core principles I hold very close to me, which is, first one is

[27:03] Jeetu Patel:
you got to build a platform, not just an individual collection of products that don't talk to each other. You have to have an integrated platform, and two, you have to have an open ecosystem. And if you do that right, then then there's a pull from the market towards you, whereas versus if you do that wrong, you have to push your products into the market, which is a much harder thing to do. It's a lot harder to win zero sum games with multiple competitors, and you're always going to have multiple competitors.

[27:28] Jeetu Patel:
And and, like, you you you can't think that you're going to get every market transition right every single time and be the first in first to market over there. Totally. And that you're going to be an expert in every single thing because, you know, you're going to still be constrained on resources. Like, I I think it's just much better to make sure that you stay focused

[27:46] Jeetu Patel:
at what you do best. My my rule of this one is if I stay focused on what I bring a unique perspective to, where I have permission to play that I do better than anyone else, and then for everything else I partner, then what ends up happening is you just build a vibrant ecosystem. And that is truly the definition of a platform where your contribution of your technology

[28:09] Jeetu Patel:
is so big that it actually catalyzes a movement throughout the entire industry, and that the industry makes much more money from your technology than you make from it yourself. That then creates a level of value inherent in

[28:26] Conor Bronsdon:
society with your contribution. I think this is a great point for leadership as well, not just for company to company interactions, but to building your own personal stack of skills. Like, yes, you should build out and trust and improve your unique skill set, but you're not gonna be an expert in everything under the sun. This is why people build teams. This why we bring in intelligence systems to support us.

[28:50] Conor Bronsdon:
So I I just think it's an important note here, especially as we think about that jobs conversation that we had earlier. And I see this strategy for Cisco playing out in multiple ways. So we talked a bit about NVIDIA. And as I mentioned, you've also been deepening partnerships in The Middle East with g forty two and The UAE, looking to build out secure end to end AI infrastructure there. It's obviously an emerging area for several companies who are who looking at The Middle East as a Let me actually talk about those partnerships just to see your So NVIDIA, we've got a multidimensional

[29:21] Jeetu Patel:
partnership where we they build out AI factories. We said, what about if we actually had secure AI factories? Would you want an AI factory, or would you want a secure AI factory? It makes more sense to have a secure AI factory. So we actually have our security capabilities factored into the AI factory architecture, and then we we have you know, their reference architecture

[29:44] Jeetu Patel:
is something that we've continued to make sure that we can get certified, you know, against. That's one. We've also used we just launched at our earnings our nonaudit earnings at at GTC, you know, the 9,100 switch where we can take their spectrum ex silicon and integrate that with our our switches so that we can build switches with their silicon as well, even though we build our own silicon. And the reason for that is because sometimes customers prefer theirs, and so you just wanna give customers a choice.

[30:16] Jeetu Patel:
And so those are the kind of things that we've done with NVIDIA, and we have we have a continued level of, you know, kind of of of tight synergy between our engineering teams that we can continue to keep partnering together. In fact, some of the executives at NVIDIA are very dear friends of mine. And, you know, we we I I think people like doing business with people that they actually tend to

[30:41] Jeetu Patel:
enjoy. In fact, yesterday, we had our earnings call, and I had three or four of my competitors who just sent me a very kind note saying, hey. Congrats on a great earnings call. And it just feels good to just operate that way. You know? With g forty two, we have a very we are partnering very much with the sovereign cloud kind of initiatives that are going on, whether it be in UAE, with G42,

[31:08] Jeetu Patel:
whether it be in Saudi Arabia, with the Humane Group, and we want to make sure that we are continuing to partner with them so that as they do this data center build out, that we become the network of choice for them. And so that's happening over there, and we will continue to keep doing that. We I've been to Saudi and The UAE three times in the past six months.

[31:28] Jeetu Patel:
We've met with, you know, the crown prince on both sides, and we've actually had a very tight partnership with g forty two with Humane. We've known each other for many, many years, so I think it really helps. And then I I'd say that even with the model providers, we will continue to partner with all of them because we want to be the Switzerland across the entire industry,

[31:50] Jeetu Patel:
and we want to make sure that we can provide network regardless of the model provider, regardless of the GPU provider,

[31:57] Conor Bronsdon:
and we wanna provide the networking security observability across the entire stack. Love that. And I would be remiss if I didn't briefly mention that our our sponsor, Galileo, is also an AI factory partner with NVIDIA, so it's a very cool program. Highly recommend checking out the validated designs they're doing with Cisco and many others there. Really, really cool program. We'll have have NVIDIA on to talk about it at some point. That'd a fun episode as well. But

[32:20] Conor Bronsdon:
I I wanna ask about a couple of the other infrastructure constraints you brought up. So you mentioned, you know, power generation for AI infrastructure. And, obviously, you're looking at AI on the edge as well, and there are different constraints and opportunities that come with that. How are you thinking about these other constraints that we're seeing within the infrastructure that backs AI? I think, like, power is a very interesting one because

[32:42] Jeetu Patel:
what's happening with power is rather than power being pulled to where the data center needs to get built out, what's happening is data centers are getting built where the power availability is the highest. And that I don't think is going to be a phenomenon that changes. I think every country is going to want to have their own sovereign data centers, and what we need to make sure that we do as

[33:09] Jeetu Patel:
an American company that believes in the power of, you know, what America brings to the table is we wanna make sure that any any and all of these data center build outs that are happening worldwide are using American technologies to actually build these data centers out. And so whether it be in in a in in Southeast Asia, whether it be within The Middle East, whether it be in Europe, whether it be in South America or Canada, we want to make sure that we can help

[33:40] Jeetu Patel:
the build out of data centers in addition to the data centers that are being built out in The US. And I think that the power scarcity will make it very important that these are global initiatives rather than just localized initiatives because you can't just always pull the power exactly where you need, which is also why this this notion of scale across that I mentioned

[34:02] Jeetu Patel:
is really important. Sometimes you might not have enough power that you can pull into a single data center, and so you might need to have multiple data centers, but those need to operate like one data center that might be hundreds of kilometers apart because a training run has to operate with a number of GPUs that might not all fit within one data center. So if you need 300,000

[34:24] Jeetu Patel:
or 500,000 or a million GPUs to go out and do a training run, and a data center can only host fifty, seventy thousand, a 100,000 GPUs, then you might need to have a coherent cluster of GPUs that might span data centers, and that's where scale across networking is really important, where the technologies around security and around low latency communication that's power efficient

[34:49] Jeetu Patel:
gets to be very important because if you drop a network packet in a training run, you have to restart your training run. So you have to have technology that's built in the silicon chip itself that says, I'm going to provide things like deep buffering so I can buffer the variance of the bit rate of the packets going in. And then that way, if there's a little bit of a dip,

[35:14] Jeetu Patel:
to I'm not go out and negatively impact the training run because that costs millions of dollars if you have to restart the training run. So those are the kinds of things that require deep architectural forethought that we've actually put in place for building out. And these are hard computer science problems and hard technology problems that Cisco does best at. And

[35:37] Jeetu Patel:
the way I like to help people think about Cisco is think about us as the picks and shovels company during the gold rush. We are the critical infrastructure company during the AI era where we just keep things humming so that everyone can get full potential from the AI investments that they're making. And being a picks and shovels platform during a Goldrush is a fantastic place to be. Ain't entirely shabby. You know? It was a it was a good good good time to be in the picks and shovels business. You've been talking a bit about trust from a security perspective, from a successful networking perspective.

[36:13] Conor Bronsdon:
And I can imagine there are other dimensions of trust that are coming up in these partnerships too because, you know, as you mentioned, Cisco's an American company, but is working with these major international partners. Folks wanna have sovereign cloud, sovereign data centers. How do you navigate those tensions as you ensure there's trust across all partners and make sure that you're not playing a zero sum game, as you brought up? Yeah. I think on on that front,

[36:39] Jeetu Patel:
you know, we, what's really important is working closely between the public and private sectors. The public private sector partnership is more important today than ever before. In the past six to twelve months, the number of government leaders I've met and gone out and visited is nontrivial. And why is that important? Because I think we have to learn from them on what their their challenges are. They have to learn from the private sector, and then we have to make sure that we come up with joint solutions that can meet their requirements and that can also be technically feasible from our side.

[37:17] Jeetu Patel:
And so, you know, when you think about a sovereign like, the reality is is there are two choices right now on who you can buy AI infrastructure from. Right? It's either an American company or it's a Chinese company. Those are the two choices. And, you know, I have a lot of, you know, kind of sense of urgency on this particular topic because we have to move really fast because they're a very capable competitor in China. They actually can.

[37:54] Jeetu Patel:
They have done a great job in innovating, and their constraints are slightly different from the world's constraints. And it's helping them to be more efficient in certain areas, looking at deep sea And in certain other areas, they might not be as viable a provider

[38:09] Conor Bronsdon:
as we might be. Like, for example They don't have nearly as many data centers, for example. Or

[38:14] Jeetu Patel:
they might build technology, whether it's silicon or something that might be, you know, like, for example, they don't build two nanometer GPUs. You know, they build seven nanometer GPUs. The US builds two nanometer GPUs, but they have more resources on the power side. Yes. And they have more engineering capacity. And so they can say, well, the inefficiency of a seven nanometer GPU can be offset by unlimited power and unlimited, you know, kind of optimization

[38:47] Jeetu Patel:
of engineering resources. Those are the kind of things that are puts and takes that have to be played. And I feel like it's very important to keep in mind that as we build out the future, that US is a very formidable participant in building out AI capacity, data center capacity, not just for our own needs, but for the global need worldwide. And that requires us to make sure that we are engaging with the governments. We have the right level of regulatory policies in place.

[39:24] Jeetu Patel:
We are working with our US government to make sure that everyone's on the same page. And so we tend to do a lot of that. And I think I have to give a lot of credit to our current administration on the way in which they're kind of navigating this, as well as

[39:39] Conor Bronsdon:
all the administrations of different countries that we're working with. I think the silicon point is obviously the one that's most talked about. Look, we have this chip advantage. We simply are our head here. We're keeping China from getting access to this technology. They already have a major power advantage. We can't let them also have a chip advantage. But I I think an underrated

[39:59] Conor Bronsdon:
conversation that some folks are having, but I think isn't as broadly consumed in AI circles, is the capital, pardon me, the capital allocation advantage that America has as well with the the VC community, with the ability to fund all these startups, fund all these different companies instead of having a largely state directed system that is, you know, powerful when it's brought to bear on a problem that they know how to solve,

[40:25] Conor Bronsdon:
but is less strong when it comes to solving diverse problems that they may not know from the start how to go after. Yeah. I think I think our our

[40:35] Jeetu Patel:
venture system and our startup ecosystem and our innovative spirit of America is something that you should you should not underestimate. I think it's it's it's definitely one of the one of the superpowers that we have. And, you know, in super cycle like this one that we're going through right now, I think that's very important because you to work in a very nimble way, and you have to make sure that many ideas

[41:04] Jeetu Patel:
and many experiments get started. But then when an experiment starts to do well, you know, you double down on it. And capitalism is a great way to make that happen. You know? And so I do feel like there's this inherent advantage that we have. But I will say this. I think it's a time for America to be very paranoid and move with a sense of urgency because our competitors

[41:33] Jeetu Patel:
are not incapable, and they can actually do a very good job as well. The speed at which the industry is moving is very important. Like, you know, any kind of slowdown in speed of execution can be detrimental and can risk any company losing the lead and the other one taking it over. So while we're in the lead right now, I subscribe to the belief that being paranoid

[41:59] Conor Bronsdon:
is always a good idea in these kind of markets and these kind of tectonic shifts that are occurring. Yeah. We we can't be dismissive. There are real advantages of other systems, and there are real advantages that China has in particular. And I do think your point about speed is really important one, and it actually relates back to Cisco for me in some ways because Cisco has been described as the world's largest startup because of your acquisition strategy at some points.

[42:23] Conor Bronsdon:
I think at one point, you completed 30 acquisitions in a single year. In in AI forward world, how does this acquisition and integration strategy evolve to align to your platform play? So, you know, we are very,

[42:37] Jeetu Patel:
lucky in the in the sense that we have a very strong balance sheet, and we have a culture where we are able to make it's kinda like the company's version of inviting people from everywhere to come in and innovate and do really well at Cisco. We do that inherently well. And so when you start thinking about our acquisition strategy, we've been a very acquisitive company

[43:05] Jeetu Patel:
throughout our lifetime, but I have a slightly different take on this than we might have had a while ago, which is I don't believe that your strategy should be one that's dictated by acquisitions. I believe that you should have a very clear true north and a very clear point of view of the future that you want to build out, where you have permission to play, where you have unique insight that you can bring to the table, where you have a structural advantage. Advantage.

[43:38] Jeetu Patel:
And then if you happen to come across a company that can accelerate that pathway for you to get there, then you shouldn't be shy to deploy your balance sheet. But your goal should not be an acquisition. The simplest way to talk about this is when I first joined this company and we would talk about a priority area, people would come to me and say, hey, Jithu, it seems like

[44:02] Jeetu Patel:
category X is a priority area. What are we going to buy? And my response to them is, I think it's a wrong question. The question should be category X seems like it's a priority area. What are we going to build? And if during the course of building, you come up with an idea that could accelerate your build out, then by all means, use your balance sheet effectively to make sure that you can deploy that capital.

[44:30] Jeetu Patel:
And your investors would love it. Your customers would love it, all of that. But don't go in this rapid frenzy of just randomly buying things because you missed a market. I don't think that's the right way to success. I feel very passionate about being obsessed about innovation organically. I don't think that a company does well just by acquiring. A company does well

[44:54] Jeetu Patel:
by having an instinct for how to innovate organically. But the company also should know that when you get to scale, you can have a not built you know, kind of not built here syndrome. You have to make sure that you stay open minded to, oh, someone else built something better than us, and that seems to be an opportunistic moment for us to go out and augment that team with ours. Let's go ahead and do it.

[45:19] Jeetu Patel:
And that's the way that we thought about the acquisition strategy, and I think it's it's working out really well. We've made, you know, I my time over here, I've made, you know, seventeen, eighteen acquisitions. I don't I don't know the count anymore, but but it's not something where I I obsess about the acquisitions. I obsess about the strategy that we need to pursue, and acquisitions is just one of those avenues that accelerates that for us. It becomes a tool in your platform strategy. It becomes a tool in the platform strategy. Exactly. It's very well put. You mentioned True North and this idea of having a clear vision for what you think Cisco's platform should be. You've talked about a few concepts, openness,

[45:59] Conor Bronsdon:
trust, security, infrastructure. If you were to define today what your true north for Cisco's AI enabled era is going to be. What what do you think it looks like?

[46:12] Jeetu Patel:
The way I would define it is we have to be the critical infrastructure for the AI era. What does that mean? That means that at every layer of the stack, we should have meaningful contribution. We will build silicon and network ASICs that can really help us, you know, build the most most expedient, low latency, high performing energy efficient networks. We will build the systems that the that's that that silicon is used in, which is the physical boxes and the hardware.

[46:44] Jeetu Patel:
We will be build the operating system and the software for management on top of that. We will have security platforms that can help networks not just be naked networks, but networks that are secure networks. And so we have to fuse security into the fabric of the network, and that's one of the key differentiators that we have because our our security competitors

[47:07] Jeetu Patel:
don't have networking, and our networking competitors don't have security. We are the only company that has both at scale. We're one of the largest networking companies in the world. We also happen to be one of the largest security companies in the world, so that really helps. And then we need to make sure that we have observability on top of that. And finally, we should have know how on how to build applications that get to hundreds of millions of people.

[47:33] Jeetu Patel:
And if we can build that stack all the way through for classical workloads as well as AI workloads, I think we will be in be in amazing shape as a company, not just by making money, but by contributing to society and the community in the best way possible, knowing what we know. Because I personally believe that the reason I came to Cisco and the reason I feel like this is one of the most magical places to work at is it's a very mission driven, purpose oriented company.

[48:06] Jeetu Patel:
And if we the world is a different place when we win compared to when someone else wins. And and I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind on how we kind of wanna continue to keep building on on top of the investments that we've made. We've been in business for forty years. The amazing part is during those forty years, we built out these very durable

[48:33] Jeetu Patel:
franchises. And if we can keep innovating in each one of them like we're a start up, but operate at speed with scale, I I think this is one of the most special companies in the world right now, if if that happens. And right now, the way I think about this is we are on the journey to becoming a great company from being a good company. We had stopped innovating for a while,

[49:00] Jeetu Patel:
and we are now back on a tear on innovation. We even innovated more in the past fifteen years than we have in the previous decade combined. And I would say that this is the worst that you should see the innovation velocity for the next decade. We will continue to keep accelerating that, and I think there's a spring in the step in the employee base. I think people are excited.

[49:21] Jeetu Patel:
You know, we are I'm I'm so grateful at the hard work that all of them are doing, not just in the outputs that they're delivering, but I think they're putting their heart and soul into it. And you can feel it when people put their heart and soul into something versus when they're just doing a job for the sake of doing the job. Our employees are putting their heart and soul into it right now, and you can feel it in every step of the way. They sweat the details.

[49:42] Jeetu Patel:
They feel terrible when something doesn't go right, and I

[49:46] Conor Bronsdon:
have a lot of appreciation for that. I actually have to admit I agree simply from the interactions I've had with Cisco team members over the last year, working with a lot of the folks over at Outshift Outshift on by Cisco for folks who don't know, but doing amazing innovation work for Cisco. And we had the opportunity to be part of their agency partnership, which is now with the Linux Foundation, and looking at how agents communicate and kind of setting the stage for that next decade.

[50:10] Conor Bronsdon:
And super talented team members there. It's been a ton of fun working with them. Bjor is a great leader. We've we've been very lucky to have him, and he is you know, he's a force. Absolutely. And I'll shout out on the marketing side, getting to partner with Luke Tucker and and Leah Reiter was fantastic. Great great folks. Mank and many others. So hopefully, they listened to this episode.

[50:31] Conor Bronsdon:
There you go. As you think about building the team at Cisco, continuing to drive this culture of innovation, I'm sure you're taking lessons from your own career. And it sounds like you've been thinking in a very mission driven format for a long time, and that's part of your inspiration here. How do you I guess, what lessons, one, are you taking from your own career that you're applying to building the culture at Cisco to ensure incredible innovation?

[50:55] Conor Bronsdon:
And two, who are the sorts of people you're looking for to join the team? So I I look for certain

[51:02] Jeetu Patel:
characteristics in people much more so than other characteristics. And so I'll I'll just tell you what I I find as a very good predictor of success for that individual to be able to add value. I think the most important characteristic I look for is hunger. And the reason I say hunger is you can teach people a lot of things. You can't teach them hunger. They're either hungry or they're not hungry. And

[51:29] Jeetu Patel:
the the level of lift that it takes to teach someone to be hungry, which you can't do anyway. I think life has to teach you hunger, to your point. Yeah. That's you you just have to be self motivated. I don't wanna have an email or a rah rah session to motivate people. I think people have to be intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically seek motivation from others. So that's number one. I look for hunger. The second thing I look for

[51:58] Jeetu Patel:
is extreme levels of curiosity where, you know, you you have to have this insatiable appetite to learn, and learning should be the thing that gets you really kind of excited about life. And I I was talking to one of our engineers in the silicon team recently, and I asked him, like, hey. So how are you how are you thinking about Cisco? He's like, g two, as long as I'm learning,

[52:28] Jeetu Patel:
I'm happy. The moment I stop learning, I'm not happy. And I've just learned this about myself. And so you just need to make sure that I keep learning. And I'm like, I don't need to make sure. You need to make sure you keep learning. He's like, absolutely. I need to make sure I keep learning, but I need to make sure that I'm I'm in those projects where the learning is exciting to me. And I'm like, absolutely. That's the thing that we need to do. So the second area is curiosity, extreme levels of curiosity that people have. And by the way, in the age of AI,

[52:56] Jeetu Patel:
that's getting to be easy. The amount of time that you can take to get dextrous at something is compressed so much that it's actually fun to live life constantly learning. Right? So that's the second one is curiosity. The third one that I look for in people is clarity of thought because I think it's very hard when you have modeled thinking to then have clarity of communication that's inspiring to other people.

[53:27] Jeetu Patel:
So you have to be a very clear thinker. If you're a very clear thinker, communication then of that thought is a learned skill. You know? But if you just don't have clarity of thought, you should spend a lot of time on the clarity of thought. And so you have to have clarity of thought, which then leads to clarity of communication, which then leads to inspiring other people to follow you on your vision.

[53:51] Jeetu Patel:
And if you don't make this a team sport, it doesn't work. Right? And then the other thing I look for is, you know, is there a I know the obvious stuff is like, you know, base level of intellect and, you know, follow through skills and all of that stuff. But I think you have to assume that that's just the baseline. Like, if you if if you're not but what I don't look for always

[54:15] Jeetu Patel:
is experience. In fact, I I wanna have the right mix of experience and inexperience in a team. Because if you have everyone that's super experienced, what ends up happening is you can start to get a false sense of confidence because you've seen a pattern before when there's no evidence that that pattern will repeat itself because there's so many variables that might that might have changed

[54:40] Jeetu Patel:
in the meanwhile. So I actually feel like having people that can do good pattern recognition through experience, coupled with people that have no experience, that can teach the people that have pattern recognition to also unlearn the bad habits that they've learned constantly, I think is a really important thing. And so the combination of a team composition,

[55:05] Jeetu Patel:
which is experience and inexperience combined together, super important. And that's that's how I think about the the formula of structuring teams is those kind of pieces. And then, you know, it's just nice to be with people that aren't afraid of conflict and aren't afraid of debate, but aren't assholes either. You know? And it's like brilliant assholes are are a pain to deal with.

[55:34] Jeetu Patel:
On the other hand, one of the worst forms of, you know, one of the worst characteristics that I see in a company sometimes is being artificially nice rather than being kind. And so, like, if you see a problem and you don't say something about the problem, you're actually doing a disservice to your peers and to your shareholders and to your customers and to your stakeholders.

[55:58] Jeetu Patel:
I would rather that you actually have the debate, be the debate about substance, not style, and be the debate about something where, you know, you don't take things personally, but the collective objective is to just keep making sure that you deliver the best outcome for the market. And if you can do that, then you end up doing well. If you don't do that, then it becomes a vanity exercise. And a vanity exercise usually doesn't have durability

[56:25] Jeetu Patel:
in in my mind.

[56:27] Conor Bronsdon:
Think your point about constructive tension and conflict is one that I had to learn as a early career manager, honestly, where it's very easy to try to encourage your team and be kind to them and then fail to be real with them or at least fail to show them that where there's a problem. And you're doing them a disservice, you're doing the company a disservice. You're doing yourself a disservice, and you're creating this long term cultural problem if you're not able to have tough conversations.

[56:58] Jeetu Patel:
Yeah. I think, like I feel like conflict is a necessary condition of business. You know? And if you don't have enough tension in the system, then what ends up happening is you start succumbing to groupthink, and groupthink is the worst thing that can happen. You know, most of the times like, what I get more paranoid about is not during the times when we're we're like, five years ago,

[57:21] Jeetu Patel:
we were we were not the coolest company. We were not doing as well. We had a lot of kind of hurdles to overcome. So I wasn't as worried five years ago about us becoming complacent and, you know, risking that. I worry much more about that now than I did five years ago because success can breed arrogance, and success can breed complacency. And what you have to do, especially when you have success,

[57:53] Jeetu Patel:
is preserve humility and stay paranoid. And if you can preserve humility and stay paranoid during your successful years, then your success becomes a tailwind and can actually propel you forward. If you start getting arrogant, then your success becomes your headwind, and it actually pulls you back. And so I've always found that intellectual arrogance is something to be really, really kind of careful of, like

[58:27] Jeetu Patel:
steer clear of it. And it's so easy for smart people to even reason their way out of not needing to be intellectually arrogant. They're like, no. No. We don't need to be. I'm smarter, I know it, and they'll have some kind of good justification for it. So I I always feel like surround yourself with people better than you and always know that you're prepared to unlearn because the patterns that you have don't last forever.

[58:54] Jeetu Patel:
And at some point in time, have to forget that pattern to learn the new pattern because remembering that pattern and learning the new pattern might be very hard to do cognitively. Humility about learning, to your point. Humility about learning is so important. And It's something that seems obvious, but is a trap that a lot of smart people fall into all the time.

[59:17] Jeetu Patel:
By the way, sometimes what ends up happening is it's confused that if you debate an idea that you're not humble. And and so sometimes the absence of conflict is seen as humility, whereas the reality is you should be humble with with a deep desire for debate about ideas, but not about personality. Like, you know, the best idea should win, and it shouldn't matter what rank they have. You should just focus on being intellectually honest about the best idea that wins, and don't

[59:48] Jeetu Patel:
create a version of your truth in the company. Seek the truth.

[59:53] Conor Bronsdon:
And if you could do that right, then very different things happen. I think by pretty much anyone's metrics, you've had an incredibly successful career yourself. How have you managed this and kind of cultivated these traits along the way for for you? I think it's maybe a great lesson for leaders who are looking to someday reach those heights. You know, I I I

[60:15] Jeetu Patel:
actually don't think of myself right now as particularly uber successful. In fact, there are times in my life where I feel like, yeah, I've I feel like I could do more. And so one thing I tend not to do much of is I don't tend to gloat in what what has happened in the past, and I just focus on what's not happened yet and what do we need to go at. And and then if if I were to say,

[60:45] Jeetu Patel:
what is the thing that keeps driving me? I tend to be obsessively focused on continuous improvement all the time. And where I get motivated the most is when I'm learning something new. And so I just put myself in in positions where, you know, learning is a necessary prerequisite for getting the job done. And that means that I tend to do a lot of jobs where I don't have that much experience.

[61:18] Jeetu Patel:
You know, when I when Chuck Robbins, our CEO, asked me to take the job for running all of product, I knew nothing about networking. You know? When I first came to Cisco, I knew not I didn't know that much about infrastructure. When I first went to Box, I didn't know that much about a pure SaaS company. When I went to EMC and I'd I'd joined the Documentum team, I didn't know that much about software.

[61:45] Jeetu Patel:
And when I had first started my own company, I knew nothing about going out and starting a company. And I've always felt that that that slight nervousness of feeling like I don't know everything over here keeps me humble and keeps me wanting to learn rather than getting intellectually arrogant saying, I've figured this out. Because it's when you start getting that cockiness that you've figured something out, which is when you actually screw things up. I have certainly done that in my own life before, so I think that's that's a great note.

[62:15] Conor Bronsdon:
I do have to ask you one very specific career question because you told me this before we started recording, and I I have to ask. You told me you you don't use email anymore. Can you tell me about that? I'm not particularly

[62:27] Jeetu Patel:
know, like, there's there's two kinds of people in the world. There's inbox zero and inbox 67,842. I'm the inbox 67,842. Chuck Robbins, my boss, is an inbox zero kind of guy. He's super organized. Does that create some tension maybe sometimes? No. He's actually the thing I love about him is he has accepted me for who I am. I love that. To the point that it's actually ridiculous what his level of patience is. Because if he sends me an email, he will send me a text and say, check your email.

[62:59] Jeetu Patel:
You know? But which is something that is just a boon that you have if your boss is telling you, like, hey. Check your email. I'm I've accepted you for your flaws, and I'm gonna make sure you do it. But Okay. So extra piece of advice here, work for great leaders who understand their people. I want to say their people because he's really good at that. And the the reason I don't check email that much is I find it to be super,

[63:24] Jeetu Patel:
you know, like, interrupting to my flow of thinking. And if I just did every single one of my emails and the higher you could get up in the organization, then the volume of email gets to be untenable. And so what ends up happening is you get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day. If I just did email all day long, I think there's people way smarter than me that keep

[63:46] Jeetu Patel:
have a system for how they manage email. I'm just not that guy. Every person I've worked for so far, though, has been really good at doing emails. So I have to still find someone who I can relate to on that dimension that's not good at doing email that I've worked for. But but I do feel like that's that's an area that, all jokes apart, I I feel like that's an area that I'm not very good at. And

[64:11] Jeetu Patel:
I had this I'll I'll give you this example. So there was this gentleman named Joe Tucci who used to be the chairman and CEO of EMC, and I used to work at EMC for a while. And when I was leaving, he was very gracious to give me, you know, like an hour of his time. It was supposed to be a fifteen minute meeting. He was kind of very kind to me, and he said, let let me give you an hour and coach you on what you need to do next.

[64:34] Jeetu Patel:
And he said to me, take a piece of paper before you start your next job and create four columns. In the first column, write down everything. And by the way, you don't need to show this paper to anyone, so there's no reason for you not to be intellectually honest. This is just for yourself. But the first column, write down things that you're really good at doing

[64:54] Jeetu Patel:
that you love doing. Right? Second column, write down things that you're really good at doing that you hate doing. Third column, write down things that you suck at that you love doing. And fourth column, write down things that you suck at that you hate doing. And be very intellectually honest. Don't try to have societal programming dictate your thinking. So, for example, don't say, I love managing very large teams

[65:24] Jeetu Patel:
as a passion because you're just seeking status at that point. And so, stop doing that because no one likes, like managing a team is not a thing in and of itself. Managing a team You do love growing people and mentoring. Yeah, exactly. And so, he said, do that. Then take the paper and cut it into two pieces, the first column, and then the second, third, and fourth column.

[65:50] Jeetu Patel:
Now crumple the second, third, and fourth column and throw it in the bin because all you should care about is the first column. What do you love doing that you're really good at doing? And for everything else, make sure you surround yourself with people that they are in the first column for the things that you're in the second, third, or fourth column. And it's actually something that's stuck with me for a long time. So for example, I never take a job in a place

[66:17] Jeetu Patel:
without my head of business operations who comes with me in every job for the past fifteen years. Her name is Jessie. She is even though in the org chart, it looks like she works for me, there is no confusion in the entire company that I work for her. She can veto me at any point in time. She is the one who actually knows me well and knows what I don't do well.

[66:41] Jeetu Patel:
And the reason I do that is because I am infinitely better with her by my side than without. My chief of staff, Shear, someone that is constantly critical to me about things I'm doing wrong. But what you do is you surround yourself with people that are complementary to you, that aren't shy to tell you that you're screwing up, and that have no tolerance for placating you and inflating your ego unnecessarily,

[67:08] Jeetu Patel:
but that are smart enough to know that when you're not going through a good time and you're low on confidence, they know exactly how to boost you up. And I think if you can find even two, three people around you like this and then cherish them, I've been lucky enough in my life that I've probably got, like, thirty, forty people like this. But without Jesse, I don't take another job.

[67:33] Jeetu Patel:
You know? Without Cher, I don't take another job because, like, it's it's very important because it's a team. You're buying the team. You're not just buying an individual. I don't wanna be I'm not very good at sports, but I don't wanna be traded as an individual player in a different team. I wanna make sure that the team goes from place to place and actually wins the championship. And when we've got fifteen years of working together experience,

[67:59] Jeetu Patel:
there's an intrinsic level of trust that's built in the system, and that trust really helps in making sure that you can cut through a lot of the bullshit and just get to the High trust teams just perform better, period. They just perform better. We spend a lot of time in establishing trust in our teams and the ones that we build, because I feel like if you don't have that, then all you're doing is

[68:27] Jeetu Patel:
adjusting stylistic mechanisms of providing feedback. And I feel like that's the wrong way to do things. Like, you should just accept people for who they are and then say, you know, I should be able to divorce your style from your substance, and you should be able to divorce my style from my substance. And if you just focus on the substance and ignore the style,

[68:46] Jeetu Patel:
you'll get so much more done. And, you know, Chuck has this great line that he gives me, who's our CEO. He says, Jithu, if you never worry about who gets credit for something, you'll go much farther in life. I think it's a fantastic way to think about things is just don't worry about who gets the credit. The best idea wins. Ideally, you even forget whose idea it was by the time the debate ends,

[69:11] Conor Bronsdon:
but the best idea is one. I love that we've had such a wide ranging conversation. Thank you for for sitting first along with me here. It's already been seventy minutes. But I see these clear through lines. You know? You talked about trust both in infrastructure and in people. And I think there's a lot of similarities in in how you build that and the need for both of those, for successful teams and for successful technical systems that interface with those teams. You've talked about this idea of avoiding

[69:39] Conor Bronsdon:
who gets the credit and about open partnerships, growing the pie together. You've also talked about constructive tension. I think these ideas are all extremely complementary. So I love that you've brought them up in these different areas because it really, I think, paints a clear picture of your worldview and how you are approaching things that just makes a sense across the board as far as how you've built your team, how you're building Cisco's products, and how you see the future, really. I appreciate it. It's you know, the thing is is these things are not super complicated. They just are hard to implement

[70:14] Jeetu Patel:
and stick with. No one if you tell anyone, hey. It's important to have trust in a team. No one's going to disagree with you. Actually working on building trust, really hard to do. So how have you done it? What we do is we have this thing that we do at the table group. I don't know. Have you heard of the table group? They have this book that they've written called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

[70:35] Conor Bronsdon:
Have heard of that book. Have yet to read it, but I think I'm the third on my list. It's actually I

[70:40] Jeetu Patel:
don't read full books, but I read excerpts and summaries of them. But I think it's a really good philosophy. The way that we do it is rather than just trying to go out and be transactional with each other, we try to understand the human being first in a team. And there's two aspects that are very important. One is you have to have a very clear idea of who is your first team.

[71:03] Jeetu Patel:
Right? Most people think in organizations that your first team is the team that you're managing. That's not your first team. The first team is the peers that you work with. So if I'm running product, product is not my first team. The executive leadership team on Chuck's staff is my first team. Right? The members of my team, for them, the product team is their first team, not their individual teams that they might be managing.

[71:30] Jeetu Patel:
So I think having clarity on who's the first team is super important. The second thing that we've done is we will tend to start by asking people, what is the most memorable job that you've had and the most fulfilling job other than the one that you're currently in and why? And tell us a little bit about yourself that no one else might know. And then what we will tend to do in those exercises

[72:01] Jeetu Patel:
is I will start as the leader, and I set the tone of the kind of things that I share. So one of the things, Conor, I share over there is the fact that my childhood was pretty rough, and I grew up through an abusive dad who was a con man. And as a result, I had to leave India because it was not safe for me to be in India. And I actually came to America. He was very abusive to my mom, so I had to actually hide her in an undisclosed location.

[72:30] Jeetu Patel:
I didn't see my mom for seven years. And, you know, I started my own business when I came here, and that's how I actually you know, one thing led to the other led to the other. And one of my biggest kind of characteristics for a long number of years was I operated out of fear. And my motivation was my fear. It was fear of being unemployed. It was a fear of being poor. It was a fear. And especially when my mom was alive,

[73:02] Jeetu Patel:
I was extremely worried about, you know, not having a job. And so I would be the hardest working guy no matter what. I would be the one that would never slack off on things because my entire ethos was built around. I operated out of fear, which, by the way, it's a it's a great thing for business. It's a terrible way to live life. Right? I think I'm far less fearful now than I used to be back then.

[73:30] Jeetu Patel:
But that's also because, like, enough time has passed, you you get to reflect. But when I start with something like that, what it does is it gives people context on why in certain meetings I might behave the way I do. Right? Is that I I hate losing. The reason I hate losing is I don't want to be irrelevant. The reason I don't want to be irrelevant is I don't want to be in a position where me and my company

[73:53] Jeetu Patel:
are put in a position where we will not be able to feed our families. And so I have a very, very kind of, you know, formed ethos around that. But if someone doesn't know that about me, then they they wouldn't have full context. And so we have this thing in human beings called the attribution error where, Connor, if you and I are on the same team and both of us know Jesse,

[74:18] Jeetu Patel:
but I know Jesse much better than you do, and you come in late to a meeting, Jesse looks at that and goes, Connor is a slacker. He showed up late. You know, I come in late to a meeting. She's like, wow, chief is usually never late. Is everything okay? Is something wrong with him? And that's called an attribution error where the absence of familiarity that we might have

[74:45] Jeetu Patel:
with someone can create us to not give them benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong. And the level of familiarity we have might allow us to give people the benefit of the doubt because we know them well, and we know their character, and we can vouch for them. So the first thing you have to do in a team is build a level of familiarity and context. Just like in a prompt interface,

[75:12] Jeetu Patel:
you give it context for the AI, for AI to know how to go out and respond to you. We have to make sure that there's context for humans. And so we tend to do that a lot in these off sites that we do. Anytime there's a new team member that we get, anytime that we actually have a team that gets reconfigured, we try to do that because what that allows us to do is create familiarity, which then creates trust.

[75:34] Jeetu Patel:
That trust then allows us to have conflict in a constructive way. If you don't have trust, it's very hard to have debates.

[75:41] Conor Bronsdon:
And so those are kind of things that kind of build on top of each other. I love that you bring this up because you're both creating space for others through your sharing and openness here, and you're extending that trust. I mean, I'll I'll I'll share a little back here and say, like, I publicly wrote about the fact that I was in abusive relationship in my early twenties kind of thing. And I think these are important people contexts that don't always come up in work context.

[76:05] Conor Bronsdon:
But when you have an opportunity to go deep with your team, you can learn so much about them and be able to really understand how they tick, and I think that matters so much. GCU, I I can't thank you enough for giving me the time today to learn a lot about you and and go deep with you. It's been so much fun having you on the podcast. I really appreciate you joining us. Thanks for

[76:26] Jeetu Patel:
exploring the range of all the topics, and thank you for having me, Conor. And I'm looking forward to Chain of Thought becoming one of the

[76:33] Conor Bronsdon:
most widely listened to podcasts, my friend. Fingers crossed. I I hope so. It's been a fantastic conversation, everything from people, infrastructure, security, strategic thinking, your perspective. But where can folks who are listening and can't get enough g two or can't get enough Cisco go to either follow your work or follow what Cisco's AI initiatives are gonna be doing? I think LinkedIn is probably where I post most frequently.

[76:58] Jeetu Patel:
And so, you know, g two Patel on LinkedIn is where I would go and and follow me. And then the other place is Twitter. My handle is J Patel forty one, so one of the two places. I I tend to consume more news from Twitter and post more on LinkedIn, but I use both. So, you know, go to one of those two places. And if you happen to be looking for a job in AI,

[77:23] Conor Bronsdon:
make sure you apply at Cisco. I love it. Well, Jithi, thank you so much. We'll be sure to link everything here in the show notes, including the resources around things like Cisco Unified Edge and other things we talked about today, including Foundation AI and so many other initiatives. Listeners, thank you for tuning in, and make sure to check out all the clips and content that will be coming out for this episode. I'll be posting them to my LinkedIn, as well as our YouTube. And, of course, I'll be sharing them with the Jayton and Cisco team. And you can if you really enjoyed it, maybe leave a comment on Spotify or leave a comment on LinkedIn posts. We always love to hear from you. And, yeah, tell us what your favorite part of, Juju's episode was. We'd love to know. And GG, thanks again. It's been great. Thank you, Don.