Name: Cisco’s AI Pivot: Rebuilding the Tech Stack From the Ground Up
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T15:38:00Z
Duration: 3 min 18 s
Description: Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer of Cisco, explains how the company is becoming AI-first by rebuilding its technology stack from the ground up—and why AI has turned networking, security, and infrastructure into a single, integrated platform.

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Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer of Cisco, explains how the company is becoming AI-first by rebuilding its technology stack from the ground up—and why AI has turned networking, security, and infrastructure into a single, integrated platform. Photo: Michael Claudio/WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260122/9f0a7a8e-fc7e-4090-b70f-9263832c4153/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer of Cisco, explains how the company is becoming AI-first by rebuilding its technology stack from the ground up—and why AI has turned networking, security, and infrastructure into a single, integrated platform.

Cisco’s AI Pivot: Rebuilding the Tech Stack From the Ground Up

If you looked at Cisco three years ago, your understanding of Cisco is actually 30 years dated. The way that Cisco thought about AI was we started working on AI about five to seven years ago. In fact, seven years ago, we had made the strategic decision to have NVIDIA chipsets in some of our video conferencing devices, and that's how we had started working on AI. But the seminal catalytic moment for the industry was in November of 2022 when ChatGPT came out. And at that point in time, it became very obvious that we have to be an AI first company, and that you're gonna be very infrastructure constrained in this world and we have a role to play because it's not just about the GPUs, but the GPUs have to be connected and networked together. And we actually have a very substantial role to play in that equation. And so that's when we started making sure that we did everything from building the network ASICs and the silicon chips to the systems, to the operating system, to the optics, to the compute, to the security stack, to the data stack, for hyperscalers, neocloud, sovereign clouds, as well as enterprises. So the way we thought about the tech stack from the ground up was the market itself gets a lot of benefit when it's a vertically integrated stack. So we are the largest networking provider, but we also make our own network ASICs. So we make our own silicon, then we make our systems on top of that silicon, which are the physical boxes, and then we make our own operating system. And then we have our own security platform, and we have our own observability platform, and then we have our data platform, and we fuse security into the observability platforms. What that allows our customers to do is, one, they have choice because they have an alternative to some of the other, you know, at-scale silicon providers. But the second thing is, we're the only ones that can provide the full system when they need it, but they can purchase the modular components when they need it as well. So our entire mantra on the platform is tightly integrated components that are loosely coupled. You don't have to buy everything all at once from us, but boy, when you do buy two things together, they tend to work like magic. If you think about security, cybersecurity is one of the most important issues of our time. And what's actually happening in cybersecurity, you have to assume that the attacker is already in the system and that you're trying to prevent lateral movement. But the way that lateral movement happens is it happens on the network. So the telemetry of the network is actually meaningfully additive to providing context to the security platform on how to go out and detect anomalies and make sure that you can, you know, not just detect a breach, but respond and remediate to the breach as fast as possible. So what we did was we made an architectural shift. We made sure that we baked security into the fabric of the network. So rather than having a network that you buy from someone and then having security buy from someone else and then kind of do a basic rudimentary integration, what we did was we said, let's change the architecture completely, hyper distribute security on the fabric of the network. So every switch of ours is now something that can also act as a firewall.

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