What happened
Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel stated AI will augment rather than replace human judgement, refactoring every existing job while creating new industries. Patel noted the sector has entered its second major phase, shifting from chatbots to autonomous agents. He highlighted that while overall infrastructure spending will rise, unit economics are improving rapidly: token generation costs for inferencing dropped 1,000x over the past two years, according to his PTI interview.
Why it matters
The 1,000x drop in inference costs shifts enterprise AI strategy from isolated experiments to continuous, agentic workflows. Platform architects and procurement teams face a transition from managing per-query expenses to funding broader infrastructure expansion. As autonomous agents become economically viable, the primary deployment bottleneck moves from compute pricing to human oversight and integration. This aligns with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's recent dismissal of AI-driven layoff claims, reinforcing a consensus among executives that cheaper inference drives job refactoring rather than wholesale replacement.
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