Bloomberg TalksJeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer at Cisco, speaks on how the company is positioning itself in the world of Artificial Intelligence. He speaks with Bloomberg's Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Okay, perfect transition to get to our next guest, because we're talking about the increased energy usage that we've seen a lot of that has to do with AI. Check out all the news about AI just in the last couple of days, Carol. Lots of headlines. Apple rolling out this five hundred and fifty nine dollars iPhone five hundred and ninety nine dollars excuse me, iPhone sixteen eight with an AI bid for growth. Microsoft unveiling AI tools that can create video game scenes that would normally have to be programmed and animated by a human. It's a model it built using data collected from Xbox gamers and their controllers.
There's so much going on, and don't forget this comes after the big news earlier this week. We talked about this. Mira Muradi, the former chief CTO over an Open Ai, launching a new AI startup. And then you had open ai co founder Ilias a Skiver raising more than a billion dollars for his startup at evaluation of over thirty billion dollars.
Okay, lots of money coming into this and G two Patel is on top of all of it. He's Executive VP and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, where he's charged with making sure that Cisco's portfolio works in the world of AI. He joins us from Silicon Valley G two. Where do you see Silica see Cisco's place in this new world of AI?
You know the way that we think about this. Firstly, Carolynton, thank you for having me on the show. And you know, if you look at the way that the world is evolving right now, it's it's moving really fast. But if you look back at the gold Rush, think about Cisco's position over here is we're going to provide the infrastructure and the safety and security guard rail so that organizations can actually use AI scalably in the market. And if you think about a common sentiment that you have right now in the market, and we've done a study to actually prove this as well, there's an overwhelming majority of companies where the CEOs are very excited about the possibilities of AI, but virtually all of.
Them feel very underprepared.
In fact, the study that we did, we found that ninety seven percent of the CEOs that actually we're pushing AI projects that we're really excited about it only one point seven percent of them felt fully prepared, and I totally get it. I mean, this is a it's a very fast moving market. People have to kind of think differently, and so that's an area where we feel like, you know, having preparedness and infrastructure, making sure that safety and security don't become impediments for the adoption of AI, and having the skills.
Gap get really addressed are the three.
Big challenges that most organizations have that we at Cisco want to try to go out and help our customers with CEE two.
One thing I think about is, you know, there's the idea of move fast, break things, get it. There's also well, wait a minute, we want to see where the dust settles when it comes to AI a little bit because we're at this point two more than two years in and of just the euphoria and the build and the spend, and now we want to see, okay, what do we get for our money? Is there a little bit maybe of that going on that there are executives, especially if smaller mid sized companies, who are saying, we got to kind of hold off until we really understand how do we monetize this.
Yes, if you take a step back and broadly, like, if we like to take a look at what's happening in the market, there's only two kinds of companies that are going to exist in the market. There's a first kind, which is going to get highly dexterous with the use of AI, and the second which is going to be you know, struggling for relevance. Now, if you look at the great ones, majority of them are getting slowed down because of a few very foundational reasons. The first one is, you know, safety and security gets to be a big concern, especially for large regulated organizations. They want to make sure that they tread carefully on that front. And as you have things like deep seak and you know, the cost of models gets to be lower and lower, and the cost curve goes down precipitously, you're going to have more and more models that are out there. And these models by definition are unpredictable, and we've found that it's pretty easy to jail break these models, and so that safety security concern is a real one.
The second area is that.
People just aren't quite equipped for going out and making sure that the infrastructure is ready for AI. And then third one is this notion of skills, and if you think about skills, I personally believe that staying on the sidelines is not going to help you go up the learning curve. So you have to jump in and you have to jump in the fray and make sure that you're starting to take some projects and learn from those projects and have these practical experiences as a company so that you get a better feel, a better intuition of what's happening in AI and what it's going to take to succeed. But just staying on the sidelines, I think is a really bad strategy that's going to let others get ahead of you and you'll.
Be left behind.
One thing love to hear from folks in your position who are interacting with customers each and every day is try to get an understanding of where demand is, who's buying, what house spend is. When it comes to it, what can you tell us about the environment right now, So there's.
No shortage of demand signal on AI right now.
In fact, what's happening is there's a lot of money in from different parts of it that are going into AI. And then the question becomes, what are the use cases where AI is being used really well? So if you think about some of the you know, really highly adopted use cases right now in large companies software coding and software development, in twenty twenty five, you will actually be able to have, you know, a meaningful amount of your code for a mid level engineer that'll actually be done by AI. And so that's an area that's going to be hugely you know growing. The second area that we've seen a fair amount of movement and momentum on is this notion of a contact center agent. Each one of us, Caroly and Tim, we all probably will spend about four to six weeks of our lifetimes on hold waiting for some agent. When you call a company and they need to make sure that they actually solve your problem. That's an enormous waste of time for humanity at large. And I think there's going to be ninety to ninety five percent of these calls will be addressed with a voice agent that is going to be an AI agent, where you it'll sound just waiting.
Really, I'm really still waiting for that to happen.
One that actually works and is I don't know, like I do feel like we've all gone through automated.
Systems and representative representative et representative.
That's how I do.
That's exactly right.
So is it really going to be a very different experience.
Well, I think one of the challenges that we've had if you think about, you know, calling an agent, and when you have something that's an automated agent, the reason it sounds so frustrating is that it sounds like a robot and you can't interrupt it. It doesn't understand tonality, it doesn't understand expression, doesn't understand the emotion that the customer might be feeling. And so what you're now starting to see happen is these voice agents are getting so sophisticated that you can interrupt its speed. It speaks at the speed that a human would be able to speak. You can redirect it, you can throw curveballs. It'll understand your tone if you're frustrated. It's not going to ask you silly questions when you're frustrated about things that are like how's the weather, how are you feeling, because that's not what the customer might be might might want to talk about. So those kind of dynamics will fundamentally change the take rate and adoption of this.
So in the next two.
Years, I assert that it'll probably be about eighty to eighty five percent of the inbound calls that come in will be able to be handled by an AI agent, and the ones that aren't handled by an AI agent, the AI agent will be smart enough to hand it off to a human agent with all the context, so you don't have to repeat your account number again and you don't have to go out and you know, kind of restate your problem just the way that we actually feel right now. And that's what gets the frustration levels high. And I'm I'm really hopeful about that that entire category. So that's the second category where you're seeing a fair amount of momentum, and then there's there's many more use cases and automated workflows that you'll start to just see get more and more proliferated throughout the entire corporate landscape.
Well don't judge me, G two, but I just started really playing with chat Gipt and I came in and I was like kind of blown away. I came in one morning like, Tim, you've got to start playing with You're.
Saying you soon you're going to be paying two hundred bucks a month for the agent future.
I see it.
Everything's a monthly faith.
I don't know if you folks have tried out this operator. It is unbelievable what it can do because.
A month version, right, yeah.
It's it's the two hundred dollars a month version. And by the way, the interesting part is they're losing money on the two hundred dollars a month, which tells you the amount of impact and the amount of adoption rate.
That is most people think it's bad. I think it's a really.
Good sign for EI because there's no shortage of people wanting to use this. They're solving a real problem. So you can literally tell Carol, tell this agent, Hey, I want to go out for a movie with my spouse tonight and I want to make sure that I can have dinner. Can you go find me a dinner reservation.
And I'll just do it for you.
Yeah, listen, come back soon. I really would like to continue this conversation with you. Really enjoyed it. G Two Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer over at Cisco, joining us from Silicon Valley
