Turning Cisco AI-first at scale

Jeetu outlines choices Cisco made: go all-in on AI, define success, become a platform, and embrace open ecosystems.

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Episode notes

Jeetu Patel is the president and chief product officer at Cisco, where he leads a team of 30,000 people and is playing a central role in the massive AI infrastructure buildout happening right now. Previously, he spent five years as CPO at Box and 17 years running his own startup. Recently Jeetu organized an AI summit featuring industry leaders like Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Fei-Fei Li.

We discuss:

1. How Cisco went AI-first across 90,000 employees

2. His six-part framework for building great companies: timing, market, team, product, brand, distribution

3. Why he says he couldn’t have done this job without AI

4. His “right to win” strategic framework

5. His communication framework for preventing “packet loss” across an organization

6. Why he flips “praise in public, criticize in private” and does the exact opposite

7. The important communication lesson his mother taught him

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