DJ Sampath, Cisco's SVP of AI Software, explains how the company's networking infrastructure powers everything from streaming to AI applications. As AI becomes embedded in software, Cisco sees new security risks: models can be attacked through prompt injection and other exploits. Sampath argues jobs won't disappear, but people who use AI will outcompete those who don't.
I don't believe people are losing their jobs to AI. I think people that are using AI are going to be farther ahead than people that don't use AI.
That's DJ Sampath, the senior Vice president of AI Software and Platform at Cisco. I got to interview him at Cisco Live and he had a lot of great insights into AI, but also into the bridge between AI and hardware.
What does Cisco even do right right now? If you think about it, today, when we fire up our iPads, we see like, you know, watch a video on Netflix. Cisco builds every single part of that infrastructure. That WI FI router, we build that the router that the WI FI router connects to the Xfinity connection and then the data center that Netflix hosts those movies inside of. Cisco helps build that. So think about it this way. We build the infrastructure for the Internet and now we're building that infrastructure for the modern AI era.
Cisco is involved in basically every step of this process, which means they see all of the vulnerabilities, going to start.
To see every application becoming an AI powered application. And when that happens, Cisco suddenly becomes tremendously relevant from a safety and security perspective. Because guess what? If the models have vulnerabilities, you could have attackers use techniques like prompt injection attacks or context window overloads and meta prompt extraction and then cause the model to do some unnatural things.
DJ had a lot of really thoughtful answers to some potentially alarming scenarios when it comes to AI. But the one I liked the most was his answer to the jobs question.
Really think about how this job equation is going to go every single time somebody that knows how to use AI is going to move forward faster and is going to get those jobs. The only advice would be to say, hey, get really, really comfortable using AI.
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