Cisco says that less than 5% of humanity uses AI agents and that the infrastructure is already consumed

Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance that he sees no sign of a slowdown in demand for artificial intelligence. According to him, all available infrastructure capacity is being consumed, even though only a small fraction of humanity uses AI agents.

For the executive, the market is experiencing what would be a second moment similar to that of ChatGPT, now with personal agents. Patel estimates that the portion of the population that uses these agents is something like 2%, 3%, below 5%. "Imagine when this reaches 15%, 20%, 30%", he said, concluding that he does not see how the movement can lose strength soon and that this is a secular and lasting change.

Agents that save money

Patel told host Brian Sozzi how he uses agents on a daily basis. He gave the system access to his personal email and calendar, and stated that an agent's value is proportional to the tools he has access to. In the first 30 minutes of use, according to the executive, the agent identified subscriptions that he paid for without using and proposed canceling them, in addition to undoing an accelerated plan subscription contracted by mistake.

The report illustrates, in the executive's view, the potential for efficiency gains with technology, which could already generate immediate savings for the user.

Security as a central theme

The main obstacle, in Patel's assessment, lies in what he calls the paradox of tools: without access to tools, the agent is of little use; with access, the risk increases. Therefore, he said, reliable delegation needs to be a solved problem. He stated that agent security will be "the issue of our time" and that Cisco, one of the largest security companies in the world, invests billions in the issue.

The executive compared agents to teenagers, who do not fear consequences and often exercise poor judgment. In his opinion, it is necessary to intercept inappropriate behavior in real time, as waiting a few minutes would mean that the damage has already been done.

Patel cited three concerns. The first is that agents operate at machine speed and scale, and so do malicious actors: cyber defenses, he said, can no longer be human-scale. The second is that company agents act within limits and are continuously monitored. The third, less remembered, is the efficient use of tokens: as resources will be finite, whoever uses them less efficiently will have a worse security posture and may be overcome by adversaries.

Older chips and shortages

Sozzi mentioned that prices for older Nvidia GPUs have skyrocketed, in part because many customers can't get the chips they need. Patel responded that not every workload requires the fastest chip, and that reusing components across different uses increases the durability of those assets. Although the launch cycle for new chips is 12 to 15 months, the useful life can reach many years, which means that this equipment is now treated as an asset class.

When asked if all the supply that comes into operation is consumed immediately, he replied yes. Cisco, he said, benefits from producing its own networking silicon, as well as systems, hardware and software, which would give it a vertically integrated platform.

Regarding the next surprise in AI, Patel said that the market tends to think about technology in a linear way, asking what it already does today and can be delegated to it. For him, the greatest use will come from original insights that allow us to solve previously unimaginable problems, with advances in health, education and the fight against poverty. The statements are from the executive and were not accompanied by data to prove them in the interview.

Automatically translated from Portuguese.