According to a recent interview at RSA Conference 2026, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel highlighted the trust deficit as the main reason why only 5% of enterprises have successfully transitioned AI agents from pilot to production. Patel emphasized the importance of trust in delegating tasks to AI agents, stating that trusted delegation is the key to market dominance, while lack of trust can lead to bankruptcy.
The primary issue lies in establishing a trust architecture rather than dealing with rogue agents. Patel compared AI agents to teenagers, intelligent but lacking maturity and easily influenced. He stressed the need for guardrails and oversight to ensure agents are on the right path.
To address the trust deficit, Cisco introduced several initiatives at RSAC 2026, including AI Defense Explorer Edition, Agent Runtime SDK, and the LLM Security Leaderboard. Additionally, Cisco collaborated with Nvidia to launch OpenShell, an open-source secure container for agent frameworks, integrated with Cisco’s Defense Claw framework.
Patel also unveiled a bold engineering mandate at Cisco, aiming to have 70% of the company’s products built entirely by AI by the end of calendar year 2027. This shift towards zero-human-code engineering signifies a significant cultural transformation within the organization.
Furthermore, Patel outlined five strategic advantages that winning enterprises will possess in the agentic era, focusing on sustained speed, trust and delegation, token efficiency, human judgment, and AI dexterity. Security teams are advised to verify these moats by measuring deployment velocity, auditing delegation chains, monitoring token consumption, tracking decision points, and measuring AI tool adoption rates.
As the industry evolves, the importance of telemetry in security operations becomes evident. Distinguishing between agent actions and human actions, ensuring identity verification, and enhancing telemetry capabilities are crucial steps for security teams to take in the agentic workforce era.
In conclusion, Patel emphasized the significance of token generation in driving national competitiveness, highlighting the need for secure and efficient token generation technologies. Security teams are urged to implement the recommended action plan, which includes auditing the pilot-to-production gap, testing defense solutions, mapping delegation chains, establishing behavioral baselines, and closing the telemetry gap in logging configurations.
