Jeetu Patel

Technology Executive & Board Member. President & CPO, Cisco. Proud dad. Love design. Views are mostly my own, but sometimes not entirely my own ;-)

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

There is such a profound shift occurring in the way that Agents alter our infrastructure requirements.

We are entering a networking supercycle. It’s not because humans are consuming more content. It’s because machines are beginning to think, act, and transact continuously.

Cisco's latest research on AI traffic patterns points to something much bigger than incremental bandwidth growth. Enterprise WAN traffic without agentic AI was projected to grow roughly 2.5x over the next
decade. With agentic AI, that projection jumps to ~9x.

And here’s the craziest part! After following this data closely, I believe even those numbers may prove to be wildly conservative. This is the first time when we have published a study like this where I feel that the projections might be off significantly and what we might think takes a decade happens in 3 years.

Why?

Because most people are still modeling AI like software. It is not. AI behaves more like a new species of digital labor. A SaaS app waits for humans. Agents do not. Agents continuously reason, retrieve, coordinate, negotiate, execute, and loop. At software
speed. Without pause. 7x24. They never get sick. Don’t need a vacation. Dont get tired. Don’t need sleep.

That creates a fundamentally different traffic architecture. The industry spent decades optimizing networks for bursty downloads, video streaming, and
human-paced interactions, almost all of it flowing downstream to a person on the other end.

AI traffic inverts that. A single agentic task can generate 450% more traffic than a human doing the same work.
Roughly 70% of that is inference. And nearly 10% of AI flows now carry more upstream than downstream data, versus 0.5% for typical web traffic, because context continuously moves back into models. Network traffic is not just increasing in bandwidth. It is fundamentally getting reshaped.

This last point matters most. The internet was built as a distribution system for content. AI is turning it into an active system for cognition. The path between agents and models is becoming the spinal cord of intelligence itself. When that path degrades, the agent degrades.

Networking stops being a passive transport layer and
becomes part of the intelligence stack. That changes everything about how we think about resiliency, observability, security, and capacity at the edge. We may be grossly underestimating what is coming. The future will not simply have more users online. It will have trillions of digital coworkers operating continuously on behalf of humans, enterprises, applications, and eventually physical systems.

Humans click.
Agents swarm.

That difference is what creates a supercycle. This supercycle of inference infrastructure will not just be compute bound, but also memory and network bound.

Take a look at the report here: https://t.co/4MCTDiDvC5

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

👇🏽

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

That’s nuts! And if you believe most economic value for a company is created after they go public, think of the value created in the next phase.

[@jason @Jason]

My lord, three IPOs are worth more than… all IPOs in the last 45 years of tech 🤯

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

This is so good and so true. For all the early in career people who want to make a $1B before you turn 25, read this. By all means have the aspiration but also know that durability of success matters more than a flash of luck for fulfillment.

Putting in the hours and finding joy in the mundane work when others are just focused on the outcome is such a unique differentiator if we can get our mental state to that place. Every time I have decided to not throw in the towel when shit got really hard are the times I have cherished most in my professional life.

Taking the same shot 10,000 times, 100,000 times, a million times makes it impossible for us not getting good at something. Thats how we are built. We can master anything given enough time, provided we put in the work. It is such an important lesson. And every time I personally get obsessed even at this age with the result over the process, this will act as a good reminder to focus on the process because reps matter. 👇🏾

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This paragraph by Kobe Bryant hits hard:

“Everyone wants to be a beast. Everyone wants to be the best. But very few people are willing to do what it actually takes. Because what it takes is boring. It is waking up at 4:00 AM. It is shooting the same shot a thousand times. It is watching the film when you are tired. People fall in love with the result, but they hate the process. You have to fall in love with the boredom. You have to fall in love with the repetition. If you can find joy in the mundane work that no one else sees, the lights will eventually shine on you.”

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

Yes. But these are literally outcomes for the consumer world. Reduce my cost of subscriptions, plan a vacation for me and book the tickets, filter my email and let me know what I need to focus on today, etc. are all literally outcomes it is delivering in one shot with remarkable accuracy.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

The most valuable AI relationship will not be with the model you ask questions. It will be with the agent you trust enough to say, “Handle it.”

Try either of these. The last mile in some of these bits is finally nailed for consumer use cases.

@instictlabs @Muse @bot

Others will follow soon. But it’s truly a game changer. I’ve now been using these on and off 10 or so days and I’m hooked.

The big difference unlocks with agents that has been discussed in coding for a while but is now starting to make its way for everyday tasks is tools access, long running agents and the agent getting better and better to understand you. I also think that atleast as of now, the degree of mental clarity it gets me so that I can do better work because I have the cycles to think is non trivial.

And lastly, you feel like you have this agent that is always by your side to carry out any range of tasks. It’s truly a huge unlock.

The last thing to note is that yes the model is crucial, but the product sensibility is truly what gets it to unlock in very different ways. Judgement in product decisions is a non-trivial part of the success of these agents.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

👇🏾

[sarah guo @saranormous]

incredible 💜

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

@LipBuTan1 what a pleasure it was to host you at Splunk .conf. @Cisco appreciates our partnership with @intel and I value our friendship even more. Thanks again for always going out of your way for me. Deeply honored. 🙏🏽

[Lip-Bu Tan @LipBuTan1]

Earlier this week, I connected with my good friend @jpatel41 at @Cisco Splunk .conf26. We talked about the importance of listening to customers, hearing the truth, and building a strong team that takes accountability. We also talked about the importance of security and observability in AI. We need to use AI responsibly, but we should not lose sight of how much good it can do. Thank you, Jeetu for the friendship and conversation. And thank you to the Splunk community for the warm welcome.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

The debate this week around the risks of safety and security with AI was the strongest we've seen. I happened to be in London earlier today and met with @cnbcKaren, Steve Sedgwick and @Benboulos from @CNBC.

We discussed a range of issues including safety and security, margins for hyperscalers, durability of demand, slowing down AI, global coordination to handle security risks and more.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

@BrianSozzi , thanks for having me on the show. It was so great to see you and look forward to being in studio the next time. Also really appreciate the thoughtful questions.

We live in interesting times and despite the risks of AI, I remain extremely hopeful of the possibilities and totally agree that we should mitigate the risks collectively.

There is so much potential to be harnessed with AI. Next few years will definitely keep us on our toes.

[Brian Sozzi @BrianSozzi]

🚀 Well said on AI, @jpatel41.

"Agents are like teenagers, man. They they are supremely intelligent. They have no fear of consequence. And they conduct poor judgment decisions more frequently than you and I would like. And so I do think that there's an element of risk on safety and security that should be kept in mind."

(V/@YahooFinance)

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

@ashugarg You are probably right. So no. But the value is so high that I hope they make the most of it.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

No product has changed my life since ChatGPT like Instinct has.

So crazy. I can’t even imagine what happens to this product over the next two years.

If done right, this company could be a trillion dollar company.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

This is such an effective way to run things. Focus on the things that are the most important to get right. 👇🏾. Will be excited to see what Grok Bot does here

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

We will work on this

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

@mehtamanal Nope. Don’t use any email

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

@dg252 DM me

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

We are past the point where we can remain safe and secure without the use of AI. AI is a pre-requisite for safety and security because as attacks become more sophisticated and machine scale, human scale defense simply won't be able to combat the attacks due to the sheer scale differential.

Security is a team sport and the only enemy is the adversary. However, the nuance that sometimes gets missed here is that unsafe acts can be performed that threaten security not just because of malicious intent but also because an agent may exercise poor judgement. So there will be a need to fuse data sets of security and observability because it will get harder and harder to distinguish a malicious attack from an act by an agent that exercises poor judgement.

The other point that is important to understand is that typically lack of democratization for AI can create unsafe environments for all. Reason is that the strength of the value chain is typically dictated by the weakest link. So availability of the best defenses to all institutions affordably will be a critcal element of success.

The issues we are discussing have a ton of nuance. But the elegant solutions are starting to emerge. Elon's (@elonmusk) suggestion to have models check competitive models and have a public benchmark that shows how the models perform, and have this be globally coordinated is a great suggestion. There will be many such ideas that start to emerge.

While it might not feel so, having the right discussions with the appropriate level of nuance is super important at this time because two things can hold true at the same time. That security and safety risks are real, and that global competitiveness for a country is a necessary ingredient for success. What's being debated are implementation approaches which need ideation.

Three things worth considering:

1. Assume AI is a pre-requisite for effective security

2. Token efficiency will be needed to ensure the right security posture.

3. Security is a team sport, and data sharing will be essential.

Not sure about others, but I feel encouraged that these discussions are being had and the one area that is not debatable tis that eventually we are all on Team Humans! AND given the risks created with AI, AI will be essential for ensuring human safety.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

There is no reason why America shouldn’t aim to be the world’s #1 Defense Factory of the world.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

@pdrantunez Did you delegate anything that either freed up time for you or got you to an outcome you couldn’t get to by yourself.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

The next AI supercycle will be measured in useful delegation, not prompts.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

The one thing psychologically that changes with agents as they start teaming with you to help you get more productive is that you feel a far less sense of feeling overwhelmed with volume of unread items anxiety.

I haven’t had this in the past. But Instict is the first product that has given me this feeling. It is truly something that is grossly underestimated.

@noahrshinn you have made some very strategic product decisions that are so ridiculously thoughtful.

[Jeetu Patel @jpatel41]

@SelfMadeMastery so many questions come to mind.

1. What do you say to those people who will tell you that wipers will take away all entry level jobs?

2. Do you think there should be regulation on wipers?

3. In the next 5 years, where do you think wiper technology will be?

🤣

For those that haven’t seen this, see below. It is one of the most intelligent pieces of humor with so many layers of genius. Kelly, I hope your post goes viral.

[Kelly @SelfMadeMastery]

I resigned from Tesla today. I spent the last three years doing windshield wiper research at both Tesla and Rivian. Neither are acting responsibly. They’re racing straight toward self-improving windshield wipers and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.