The Future is Coming Faster than You Think

Today OpenAI announced a research preview of Codex, an AI coding agent available via ChatGPT that can independently navigate a codebase, implement and test code changes, and propose pull requests for review.

We are exploring how Codex can help our engineering teams bring ambitious ideas to life faster. As early design partners, Cisco is helping shape the future of Codex by evaluating it for real-world use cases across our product portfolio and providing feedback to the OpenAI team.

Here’s why this is so important: We think we’re on the verge of one of the single largest transformations in product innovation velocity in history.

I am fond of saying that the real power of AI is not to replace humans in the workforce, but instead to 10X the productivity, creativity, and potential of the human workforce. This doesn’t mean that some jobs won’t go away or be changed forever. That would be naive. Instead, it simply means that by going all-in on working with and developing AI the total “throughput” of humanity will go further than we could ever dream. In practical terms, that means solving problems like cancer treatment, green energy, global food supply, and so much more. If today’s 8 billion humans had the productivity of 80 billion just imagine what we could do?

This effect will impact every industry, but software engineering is incredibly high-leverage. Being able to develop, de-bug, improve and manage code with AI is a force-multiplier for every company in every industry. For a technology company as big and diverse as Cisco? The potential is extraordinary.

At Cisco, we are building the core infrastructure of the AI era.

At Cisco, we are building the core infrastructure of the AI era. As new solutions like Codex exemplify, the future of AI will be agentic. We envision a future where billions of AI agents are working together harmoniously on our behalf, around the globe and around the clock.

This will profoundly transform and redefine the architectural assumptions the industry has relied on. Paramount to these, is that Agentic AI will be network-constrained. Agents will communicate within and across data centers, and across every place we live, work, and connect with customers— all at incredible speed, scale. and efficiency.

None of this will work without ultra-fast, low-latency, energy-efficient, and highly secure networks. Cisco not only builds those networks, but an incredible array of products and solutions that today are being used by everyone from the world’s governments, cloud hyperscalers, and global service providers, to Global 2000 enterprises and small businesses.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that we have massive library of ideas on how to make our products faster, better, more resilient and more powerful. I get pitched by brilliant Cisco people literally everyday. But like everyone else, we don’t have endless resources or time to get even a fraction of what we dream up done.

As an AI Infrastructure company, we must attract the best developers in the world to Cisco. That can only happen if they can do their life’s best work with us. We want Cisco to be a company where engineers have the best tooling in the world and are empowered to fundamentally reimagine how they write code. Partnering with OpenAI, and specifically the Codex project, is core to this mission.

I couldn’t be more excited for what our talented engineers and product thinkers will accomplish, and I’m proud to be a leader at a company with the world class technical talent and scale to make such a meaningful contribution to the future of AI coding and software development.

The future is coming faster than we think, so there’s no time to waste.

Jeetu

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