Why Cisco’s president isn’t worried about AI taking his job or Gen Z entry jobs

While many fear that artificial intelligence (AI) could shake up the job market and take white collar jobs, Jeetu Patel, president of tech firm Cisco, says they should be more concerned about competitors who are more skilled at using the technology. 

“I worry less about AI taking my job. I worry more about someone that uses AI better than me, that probably is more of a threat to my job,” he told Euronews Next. 

According to research by the tech company, which is yet to be released, 80 per cent of companies said they plan to use agentic AI within their workflows. 

Agentic AI refers to an automated AI system that can accomplish tasks with limited human supervision.

Cisco’s figures coincide closely with a report by AI company Anthropic last week, which found that 77 per cent of businesses using the company’s Claude AI software were doing so for automation purposes, which might include tasks such as filling out forms. 

Meanwhile, only 12 per cent of businesses used Claude AI for collaborative purposes such as learning.

Patel said AI’s potential to augment professional tasks is an upside as it solves problems that people could not solve before.

A s a result, he said that means “every job will be refactored and as a result, some jobs will get lost”.

However, he was optimistic and said it is important for workers to re-skill and up-skill to adapt to AI, which he said will “be more important than anything else, in that there's [going to] be more jobs that are created with AI that frankly, we don't even know what jobs are going to be created yet”. 

But Patel said the kind of jobs AI wipes out will not be entry-level jobs affecting Gen Z, or those aged roughly under the age of 28.

This reflects a stark disagreement with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who said in May that AI could wipe out almost 50 per cent of entry-level white collar jobs in the next five years. 

“There was a thesis that all entry-level jobs will go away and there'll be no need to hire entry-level people. I disagree with that thesis… that doesn’t make any sense,” Patel said, referring to Amodei’s theory.

“I don't believe that early career people should not be injected into the system because I think they are the ones that bring the fresh thinking in and I think that they're very valuable, and the way in which they use AI is also very different,” he added. 

Patel elaborated that a 20-year-old might use AI as a companion or brainstorming partner but that a 30-year-old might use it more transactionally as a search engine.

Cisco primarily provides products and services to help organisations build computer networks, which Patel said can help companies in an AI-driven world. 

But Cisco is also using AI within its own company walls: “Every function, every job, we're thinking about how that job can be re-imagined with AI,” Patel said.

He elaborated that this might include legal departments using AI to review contracts with developers using it to write code. 

Patel said this is indicative of how most companies will eventually adopt AI because it is “such a broad-based tool”.

“When you think about mobile, there's not just one application here or there. It's like everyone uses mobile. Everyone uses the internet for everything that they do. And that's kind of how AI is [going to] be,” he said. 

However, whether AI will replace jobs at Cisco is unclear. 

Last month, the company announced over 200 layoffs, many of them developers.

Asked about this, Patel responded: “The way that we think about this is we're constantly assessing which parts of the business we want to invest in, [and] which parts of the business we might have to take money and move it around.

“In most cases, we're able to actually take people who have the skills and move them to different projects. In some cases, there's a skills mismatch. If there's a skills mismatch, then you actually say, okay, those are not the people that we need for the future, but there's going to be different kinds of people with different skill sets,” he said. 

Ultimately, he said the goal is to continue to hire more people with AI skills, including AI research, development, and product management.

Superintelligence

As for artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI), loosely defined as AI having intellectual scope beyond human intelligence, Patel said he was excited but also cautious. 

“We have 8 billion people in the world today, but if we can actually make that feel like the throughput capacity of 80 billion people or 800 billion people, you can just solve problems at a very different scale than what you can solve today. And that's exciting,” he said.

“I also feel like we should not be naive about it and there [are] a fair amount of risks around safety and security that we have to keep in mind. And we have [to] make sure that in parallel, those safety and security risks are getting mitigated as the development of AI is progressing”.

He said that in any kind of technological disruption, there should be a balanced view of safety and innovation. 

“I feel like for tech companies, you can't just have a singular view. As we are building technology, you have to keep in mind the downside and you have to make sure that you keep an eye on the upside”.

Asked about his biggest fears for AI, he said it was bad actors getting access to the technology and possible cyber attacks that could affect critical infrastructure, such as hospitals. 

As for what he is most excited about, he replied that it is advancements that can “reduce human suffering and enhance quality of life for people”.

“The larger power of AI is when it starts to generate original insights that didn't exist in the human core personal knowledge, which then allows us to solve problems that we could never solve before,” he said. 

“At that point in time, there's going to be new cures for cancer and there's [going to] be new cures for diseases and there's going to be an extension of life that might be radical. 

“And those things can actually be very, very cool and progressive for society”.