By Lee Chong Ming
Publication Date: 2026-02-12 09:12:00
AI agents should be treated like employees who need vetting before they’re trusted with real work, says Cisco’s president.
Jeetu Patel said in an interview with Euonews Next published on Wednesday that AI agents working on our behalf “need to get the background checks done,” just like human employees.
As companies race to deploy autonomous AI systems that can write code, handle workflows, and make decisions, security needs to evolve just as quickly, he said.
“You have to protect the agent from the world of attacks, and you have to protect the world from the agent that goes rogue,” he added.
Patel’s comments come as Cisco accelerates its own AI adoption. He predicts that by the end of 2026, the company will have “at least half a dozen products” written entirely with AI, with no human-written lines of code, he said.
