Jeetu Patel

The Product Podcast · Cisco President & CPO on Rebuilding Products So Agents Can Use…

• What Happens When an AI Agent Shops for a Customer?

  Jeetu Patel says an AI agent that shops for a person will not take the cross-sell and upsell the way a person does. The agent is the one talking to the website, so it sits between the brand and the customer.

  A retailer used to own that relationship. The customer came to the website or the store, saw the advertising, and could be sold something else. Once the person delegates the job, an intermediary stands in the middle even if the brand learns how to pitch the agent. The shift is the same kind as moving from direct sales to indirect sales, or cutting out a middleman. It creates a lot of opportunity for new wealth and also a lot of disruption, and it should become obvious in the next wave.

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• What Is Jeetu Patel's Rule of Thirds?

  Jeetu Patel's rule of thirds is how he staffs his team at Cisco. One third are operators who know how to navigate Cisco. One third come from the industry and think in systems about the markets Cisco is in. The last third are startup CEOs, brought in to break glass with the other two and work in founder mode.

  He has personally made about 28 acquisitions. 27 of them worked out, and one did not. DJ Sampath ran Armor Blocks, a 20-person company. Cisco killed that product and that brand, and Sampath now runs AI and the platform across Cisco. The promise is that a few years at Cisco makes that founder a better operator, and a better CEO if they leave.

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• Why Does Cisco Have No Product Managers?

  Jeetu Patel says Cisco has no product managers. It has feature managers who build features for one platform, and the platform is what Cisco sells. Cisco does not sell individual products.

  Cisco used to look like a holding company. It had done 250 acquisitions, and people wanted to be general managers, each with their own sales, marketing, product, and engineering. Those managers wanted to grow their own piece and not talk to the others. A $63 billion business then becomes a collection of $100 million businesses, and a customer cannot make sense of that many things to buy. The change was from a holding company to a platform company, so the priority moved from a feature inside one product to

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• Can Every Brand Give Each Customer a Concierge?

  Jeetu Patel says every brand can now give every customer a personal concierge agent, after Cisco launched the agents at a WebEx event in Austin.

  The agent is meant to bring complete personalization. Working with Cisco also brings safety and security. The third gain is scale, because a company is no longer limited by how many humans it can assign as a personal concierge. In the past, a named account rep went to the top 20 customers or the top 100 customers. Now every customer, large or small, gets a personal concierge that can cover support, sales, consulting, and anything else the brand wants done.

  Patel treats the change as a business model shift. Done right, the economic opportunity reac

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• What Startup Did Jeetu Patel's Daughter Start?

  Jeetu Patel’s 15-year-old daughter and her boyfriend are starting a streetwear startup for hoodies, t-shirts, and sweats. She is not particularly tech savvy, does not like coding, and is very good with social media and creativity. Her hoodie price is between $275 and $325. She would rather sell few units at a higher cost because the profit margin is higher, and a higher price can make people think the product is better. For a 15-year-old, the pricing judgment is extremely sophisticated, and it is only possible because she used Lovable.

  She built a website for the hoodies within 24 hours. She designed the products and came to understand what was going on. She reached out to three manufacture

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• How Does Cisco Practice Founder Mode?

  Jeetu Patel says Cisco has said outright that it values an owner mindset, and he treats himself as a late-stage co-founder of Cisco.

  He ran his own business for 17 years, then joined a very large company and found two kinds of people. Functional managers stay in a swim lane and run their function well. Owner-mentality people run the business and step into any function when something is not working, because the goal is to win in the market. Both kinds are needed, and neither is simply better. He has always had an owner mentality, and the habit annoys people on the functional side, so a cultural change has to name the owner mindset as a value. He was 36 years late to Cisco, and he still treat

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