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Technology giant Cisco is painting a bold vision for artificial intelligence (AI), not just as a corporate utility, but also as an existential necessity that will change the way we work.
In a striking revelation at a recent AI Summit in Amsterdam, Cisco’s president, Jeetu Patel, told Euronews Next that the company has already developed a product that is written with 100 percent AI-generated code.
“By the end of ’26, we’ll have at least half a dozen products written with AI only,” he said.
Asked about what this would mean for the fate of coders, he advised: “Don’t worry about AI taking a job, but worry about someone using AI better than you, definitely taking a job. We won’t have developers at Cisco who don’t choose AI as a core habit.”
Patel said that by shifting from traditional agile development to spec-driven development, Cisco claims it can reduce a team from eight humans to three, supplemented by five digital agents, which would triple the output.
Key to this are AI agents, systems which try to plan and complete tasks and solve problems with minimal human intervention. For example, an AI agent could do tasks such as drafting and scheduling emails or arranging travel.
However, in this new paradigm, traditional human coders will need to review the code.
Patel also challenged the idea of Human-in-the-loop, the integration of human input into AI and machine learning.
However, the executive said that we should change the conventional framing to “AI is in every loop,” so that AI agents are seen as digital co-workers rather than mere tools.
AI agents that ‘go rogue’
Despite the AI optimism, the executive said he was not delusional about the technology sounded the alarm about AI agent safety and security.
“What keeps me up at night is safety and security. I think it’s very important that we don’t get rose-coloured glasses on and don’t really think about the downside implications of AI,” he said.
“These agents who are going to be conducting this work on our behalf need to get the background checks done, just like you get a background check done for an employee,” he added.
Patel said Cisco is investing billions in security systems to address two challenges: protecting AI agents from attacks, and protecting the world from agents that “go rogue.”
“We have to protect the agent from the world… and protect the world from the agent,” he said.
The company is positioning itself as critical infrastructure for the AI era, building what the president calls a “full stack” approach from silicon chips to applications.
By building everything from the silicon (ASICs) to the software and management planes, Cisco aims to be the “critical infrastructure” of the AI era.
“When we build hardware in conjunction with the software… all of a sudden, you can create a lot of magic because everything just works well together,” he explained.
Looking ahead, Patel argues that productivity gains, while significant, are not the ultimate prize.
“The biggest thing is original insights that AI generates that don’t exist in the human corpus of knowledge today that allow us to solve problems that we were never even able to dream of solving before,” he said, pointing to potential breakthroughs in disease, poverty, healthcare, and energy.
Video editor • Roselyne Min