Cisco President Jitu Patel wants the company’s engineers to write half the code.
Cisco President Jitu Patel wants the company’s engineers to write half the code.
Speaking at a press conference ahead of the Cisco Live conference, Patel said he wants to create an «agent» AI assistant for the company’s 27,000 engineers to relieve them of tedious programming work.
«Engineers should be mastering orchestration and innovation, not syntax,» he said. «I want our team to be thinking about the next big idea, not about commas in the code.»
The next day, The Register reports, he reiterated this point in his keynote speech, following a speech by OpenAI chief product officer and new Cisco board member Kevin Weil, who referenced the 2016 film Hidden Figures, which shows how NASA workers in the 1960s manually calculated missile trajectories.
«Who does that now?» Weil asked. And he predicted that in five years, programmers who write all the code themselves will look as archaic as the characters in the movie. He urged engineers to write less and use artificial intelligence more.
Patel, in turn, expressed his willingness to invest: «You shouldn’t spend 30% of your cognitive load on syntax. «An engineer’s brain should be working on bigger things.»
Cisco still has limited engineering resources, he said, and can’t turn all of its ideas into products. «I hope that with Codex (a tool from OpenAI), we can overcome that resource constraint and continue to scale,» he added.
If successful, Patel adds, Cisco will not be the only one to benefit. The company, he says, will be able to create products that help customers build their own AI infrastructure and accelerate development in other areas. «Imagine how the world of AI companies would change if infrastructure was no longer a constraint,» the Cisco president said.
Interestingly, Patel did not hint at any engineering layoffs. At the same time, Cisco conducted two rounds of layoffs last year: in February — 5% of employees, and in August — another 7%, as part of a reorganization plan to increase the company’s AI competencies.
