Executive interview: Jeetu Patel, general manager of collaboration and security, Cisco

▤ Summary

Patel, passionate about the possibilities that technology brings for inclusion, reviewed the main challenges that need to be solved today with respect to technological tools, and spoke of the need for proper change management as well as to promote a mindset and cultural preparation aligned with the advantages of the hybrid model, to be able to move towards a future in which immersive virtual meetings are the rule, and geography and distance do not matter when working as a team. Both of those things are bad outcomes for society, because what you want is to have an inclusive world, where people are able to participate in a global economy regardless of where they are, regardless of what language they speak, regardless of what socio-economic status they have. Following this idea, how do you see the future of collaboration in this hybrid work model with all the advances in tools, such as using the cloud, having natural speech recognition, speech-to-text conversion, noise reduction technologies and artificial intelligence? It has to be something that is comprehensible and understandable, so that everyone knows that the majority of the attacks that happen today and most of the breaches that occur are not due to malicious behaviour by an employee, but because of negligence. No one comes into the office saying: “Today I’m going to be negligent.” But what ends up happening is that when the technology is too complicated, people don’t understand it and mistakes are made.

▦ Linked Companies

Cisco

$1B+