Cisco President:
What Makes Agentic Transformation Work?
Large companies are assigning work to AI agents alongside their employees. Cisco’s President shares lessons from his engineering teams and offers practical advice on accountability, budgets, and leadership for executives.
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Large enterprises are moving beyond digital transformation and assigning daily work to AI agents alongside human teams. Jeetu Patel serves as President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, where he oversees the company’s products and the engineering teams that build them. The conversation examines how organizations adapt people, accountability, and budgets during agentic transformation, drawing on Cisco’s experience with AI agents writing product code.
Key points:
- Successful enterprise adopters adjust management practices, employee roles, and accountability as AI agents take on engineering and operational work.
- Planning for AI token costs alongside human staffing budgets changes how leaders allocate resources.
- CIOs, CEOs, and boards face new organizational decisions and must guide employees as AI agents absorb more of the work.
Related Episodes
Making agentic transformation work requires senior leaders to rethink who performs work, who holds accountability for the results, and how budgets divide between people and AI usage. Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco, leads an engineering organization that uses AI agents to write code for Cisco’s products. The conversation covers the organizational steps that make this shift succeed across large enterprises.
CXOTalk episode 934 examines what makes agentic transformation work at Cisco and across the large enterprises it serves.
What we will cover:
- What agentic transformation means, and how it differs from digital transformation
- Who holds accountability when AI agents write product code at Cisco
- How leaders can plan and manage a token budget alongside a human budget
- How AI agents change a leader's own job and where to draw the line between human work and agent work
- Bringing employees along when AI agents take on part of their work
- Changes to the CIO role and organizational decisions CEOs and boards must make
Episode Participants
Jeetu Patel is Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer. Previously, he was Cisco’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration, where he led the strategy and development for these businesses and held P&L responsibility for the multibillion-dollar portfolio.
Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership expertise. He has presented at industry events worldwide and written extensively on the reasons for IT failures.