Cisco warns AI plans miss 55% of enterprise data, blurring product vs model
When Cisco’s Jeetu Patel sat down with VentureBeat, he sounded a warning that feels almost personal. He’s the company’s President and Chief Product, and he says the line between product-centric firms and pure model builders is starting to blur. AI tools are racing ahead, yet they seem to skip about 55 % of the data that companies actually produce - a chunk Patel believes “will separate winners from losers.” In other words, if you’re not pulling in the machine-generated data that runs daily ops, your AI plan is probably half-baked.
Cisco’s leadership argues this isn’t just a technical hole; it could reshape how firms present themselves to the market. The upside? Companies that manage to harvest that extra half of enterprise information might pull ahead of rivals stuck in a product-only mindset.
The interview makes the stakes feel real, and the old divide between selling a product and selling an AI model is getting harder to pin down.
Cisco executives make the case that the distinction between product and model companies is disappearing, and that accessing the 55% of enterprise data growth that current AI ignores will separate winners from losers. VentureBeat recently caught up with Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer and DJ Sampath, Senior Vice President of AI Software and Platform, to gain new insights into a compelling thesis both leaders share. They and their teams contend that every successful product company must become an AI model company to survive the next decade.
When one considers how compressed product lifecycles are becoming, combined with the many advantages of digital twin technology to accelerate time-to-market of next-gen products, the thesis makes sense. The conversation revealed why this transformation is inevitable, backed by solid data points. The team contends that 55% of all data growth is machine data that current AI models don't touch.
OpenAI's Greg Brockman estimates we need 10 billion GPUs to give every human the AI agents they'll need, and Cisco's open source security model, Foundation-Sec-8B, has already seen 200,000 downloads on Hugging Face. Why the model is becoming the product VentureBeat: You've stated that in the future, every product company will become a model company.
Cisco is telling companies that an AI plan that leaves out machine-generated data feels half-baked. They point out that about 55 % of the data growth in most enterprises slips past today’s models, so pulling in that stream might be the difference between a hit and a miss. Jeetu Patel and DJ Sampath note the line between product-centric vendors and pure model shops is getting fuzzy - a trend that could change how firms jostle for market share.
Still, it’s hard to say how fast any organization can stitch these new feeds into their existing pipelines, or whether the edge they promise will actually show up at scale. In short, ignoring that hidden data could leave AI projects under-delivering. Cisco’s take mirrors a wider chat about operational telemetry versus the tidy training sets we usually lean on.
Whether machine data becomes a make-or-break factor is still up in the air, and businesses will have to balance the added cost and complexity against whatever upside they hope to capture. The conversation is alive, but solid proof is still pending.
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Common Questions Answered
What percentage of enterprise data growth do current AI models typically miss according to Cisco?
Cisco executives warn that current AI models are ignoring approximately 55% of enterprise data growth. This significant blind spot consists primarily of machine-generated data from everyday operations, which they argue is critical for a complete AI strategy.
Why does Cisco argue that the distinction between product-centric firms and pure model builders is fading?
Cisco leaders Jeetu Patel and DJ Sampath contend that the line is blurring because successful AI strategies require integrating operational data directly into products. This shift means that simply building models is insufficient; companies must also effectively leverage the data generated by their products and services to compete.
What type of data does Cisco identify as being crucial for separating AI 'winners from losers'?
Cisco identifies machine-generated data from everyday operations as the crucial, often-ignored data source. Accessing this data, which constitutes about 55% of enterprise data growth, is what they believe will determine the success or failure of an organization's AI roadmap.