AI will augment, not replace human judgment, says Cisco's Jeetu Patel

Fears that artificial intelligence could render humans redundant are misplaced, with the real breakthrough lying in combining human judgement with machine-scale automation, Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco, said.

"I don't see a scenario where humans are completely extinct of contribution of value to society. It just seems like a very far-fetched thing," Patel said, arguing that concerns about humans becoming obsolete overlook the complementary role AI is set to play.

"The magic truly happens when you take human instinct and judgement and you combine it with an AI scale of automation."  In an interview with PTI, Patel said while AI systems are advancing rapidly - from chatbots to autonomous agents capable of taking actions - they are tools designed to augment, not replace, human capabilities.

 

Citing the example of his mother being hospitalised for about eight weeks before she passed away three years ago, he said no AI is taking a nurse's job.

"There is a desire for humans to be loved. There is a desire for humans to be understood. There is a desire for us to be felt, cared for. Yes, you can go out and talk to a chatbot. But I think humans are going to yearn for human contact. And I don't think that changes," he said.

"I think human judgement and instinct are going to be pretty important to make sure that you can have exercise."  He acknowledged that jobs will be reshaped and some roles may disappear as automation deepens, but maintained that new industries and opportunities will emerge.

"Every job will get refactored," he said, adding that AI-driven transformation historically creates fresh avenues for value creation.

"While some jobs might go away, while every job will get refactored, there will be entirely new industries that get created that didn't exist in the past because of AI that allow us to actually contribute to society in a different way," he said.

"There is an instinctual need for a human to add value."  Patel said the idea that AI could leave humans with nothing meaningful to do fundamentally misunderstands human nature.

Reducing life to "staring at a beach," he argued, would challenge the very purpose of living, because people possess an innate drive to create, contribute and add value.

Human creativity, he said, is far too deep-rooted for society to simply relinquish purpose to machines. Even if AI were to accumulate extraordinary capabilities over time, that would not negate the relevance of human contribution.

The real debate, he maintained, is not about whether AI will become immensely powerful, but whether humans will lose their value.

Patel emphasised that human empathy, creativity and the instinct to add value to society cannot be replicated by machines.

While AI can be computationally trained to perform complex tasks, he said the desire for connection, care and judgement remains uniquely human.

He argued that as AI systems become embedded in workplaces as "digital co-workers", human oversight and collaboration will be central to achieving the best outcomes. Rather than replacing people, AI will allow them to abstract upwards - focusing on higher-order decision-making, creativity and problem-solving.

"I reject the notion that the advancement of AI means the extinction of human contribution to society," he said.

"The reason for that is I think we have to use AI for machine-scale throughput, but with an extreme level of human centricity."  Stating that the world is in the second major phase of AI right now, Patel said the first phase was chatbots that intelligently answered questions.

"It felt like magic," he said. "Even in that phase, you were saying that this now doesn't feel like it's a sci-fi movie. It feels normal."  Humans, he said, have a tremendous ability to normalise and get used to something that seems completely out of the ordinary and magical within a very short amount of time.

Citing an example of self-driving cars, Waymo in San Francisco, he said that at first, it feels weird. "It just feels like, oh my God, what is going on? I am alone in this car that is being driven by itself, taking me to some place, and literally, you're pinching yourself. Like, this is amazing."  The second time you sit in a Waymo, you start getting a little distracted and start doing email, and by the third time, you're complaining about the seats. "And you've just completely normalised."  "The speed of adjustment that humans have actually gotten used to because of the technological advancements that are happening so fast is going to continue," he said.

"So, what seems like completely, ridiculously science fiction-based that is never possible will become a normal place within a very short amount of time."  On costs, Patel said AI remains expensive to train and run, but unit economics are improving rapidly.

"Token generation costs have gone down 1,000x on inferencing in the past two years," he said, adding that while overall infrastructure spending will rise, the cost per query is expected to decline sharply over time.