Good morning. Mark Patterson has spent 26 years at Cisco Systems, which is long enough to watch the company navigate multiple technology cycles. But he says nothing compares to what’s happening now.
“AI is the most significant technology transition that we’ve seen in probably our lifetime, and I think Cisco was right at the heart of it,” Patterson, CFO since July 2025, told me. That includes not just building the infrastructure powering the AI economy but embedding AI into how the business runs.
Starting in its new fiscal year at the end of July, Cisco (No. 83 on the Fortune 500) is rolling out AI agents to its approximately 90,000 employees. Each employee will have access to a personalized assistant capable of handling tasks, answering questions, and routing requests to the most efficient AI model. The company said it does not separately disclose those costs outside of its earnings reporting.
The architecture reflects a focus on performance optimization. “It’s not going to burn a whole bunch of tokens with frontier models,” Patterson said. Cisco’s system dynamically selects the right model for each task. “It knows which tool is most effective and most efficient,” he said. Much of the infrastructure is built on-premises, giving Cisco greater control over cost and data.
