Finally, as has become the norm over the last year, there’s the AI pillar. On this topic, Previn differentiated between AI to make employees productive, AI as a business enabler between Cisco and its customers and partners, and Cisco’s own centralized AI infrastructure. “We’re building a lot of infrastructure for AI, we’re pushing out new capabilities for use cases in the AI cluster like noise cancellation for Webex,” Previn said.
“Engineers and technologists are really going to be essential in building the infrastructure of tomorrow. It’s very important to prioritize them. We live in a time of overhaul. You don’t have to look at IT as a cost center that you wish you didn’t have. It’s a very critical business enabler.”
Technology legislation: safeguard or brake?
On the topic of technology legislation, Previn said: “It is not something exclusive to the Old Continent, it is happening all over the world. Countries are imposing more and more laws and regulations around residency and data privacy.” As a result, “we’re thinking about what workloads make sense on the public Internet, in hyperscale environments or in the cloud, and what workloads make sense to keep running in our on-premises and our own data centers.” This, he predicted, is a trend that is here to stay, “it’s very likely going to continue.”
As far as regulation is concerned, there is a gap between the way Europe and the United States legislate, the former being much more conservative than the latter, which has raised some hackles in a technology industry that complains that the Eurozone only exports legislation instead of taking the opportunity to foster innovation or catch the AI wave.
Considering that Cisco is an American multinational that also operates on European soil, the issue came up in the course of the conversation. However, Previn, displaying the communication skills that a good CIO is expected to have these days, shrugged it off. “We are a global company and do business in more than 100 countries around the world. We focus on our business, on developing technology and selling it, adapting to each of the market’s requirements.” In the organization, he said, they have a division called access to market that is in charge of ensuring that the product sold has all the certifications and regulations required for a particular market.
Balancing innovation and regulation
Continuing with the debate between innovation and regulation in terms of AI, Previn advocates proportion. Like almost everything in life, it is a matter of balance. “At Cisco, we have a responsible AI area that works with our ethics staff and our legal team to make sure that any development is consistent with Cisco’s policies, our values and local laws in any particular country,” he explained. “Before we launch any capability, even if it’s internally for employee use only, we work with local governments to ensure an alignment with local laws.”
The trade-off between the opportunity of AI and the intrinsic risks of embracing it also gives the CIO pause for thought. “The average human being lives about 77 years, so they spend about 144 months on the job. Of those 144 months, a person spends on average 60 months carrying out administrative tasks, 44 months of meetings, and 75% of your time is spent doing something other than what you said you would do when you were older. [This technology] has enormous potential to give us back time to spend on what we really want, but it also confronts us with new risks. Language models can become corrupted, technology is trained with biases, and the pace of technological change is much faster than the ability of humans to develop skills,” Previn said.
