Public-private engagement essential for AI regulation: Cisco executive Jeetu Patel

“I think AI should be regulated. We should have public private policy, engagement on a very deep level. It should be not just a national but a global conversation because you will actually need to make sure that AI cannot be regulated by every state and every country, but have to regulate it at a global level,” Jeetu Patel, executive vice president (EVP) at Cisco said.

The comments from the San Jose-based multinational have come on the close heels of technology giants such as Microsoft and Google advocating a regulatory framework for AI.

The cloud, security and software-defined networking company which is strategically leveraging AI across its product portfolio, feels that the new technology should bring about transparency, and a responsible usage would thwart any adverse challenge.

“We have to also be thoughtful about the way in which the models get trained, the bias that it might have, the fairness equation, the transparency that we need to make sure which is why the responsibility is important,” the top executive said.

Patel said that the pace of technology could not be slowed down, and added that the public and private sector would have to collaborate very closely in order to figure out the right set of regulations including content attribution or copyright.

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Recently Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI have participated in the EU’s discussions on bringing AI into a regulatory ambit.The European Parliament approved a legislation in a bid to control the AI deployment The EU AI Act contains norms ensuring that the training data used by generative AI tools could not not contravene upon copyright laws.

The executive said that AI holds a very exciting future, and added that the same tools are also available to the bad folks that requires a caution from technollogy companies. “I do not think AI in the current form is super harmful to the existence of humanity.”

Chuck Robbins-headed company said that the policy and regulation is going to be quite important because the consequence of not having it would have a profound downside.

The multinational is banking on a fusion between software and hardware-driven innovative portfolio together with AI as an underlying element, transforming the four-decade old company into a platform provider.

“AI is going to be in the fabric of everything we do, so what you have is core features that get built in the product. We will encourage those to be more AI-driven, and our user interface (UI) will be AI driven with prompt interfaces,” Patel added.

Recently, Cisco acquired Armorblox to create an AI-first security cloud. The acquisition would facilitate Cisco’s security business unit to bring generative AI capabilities to fore.

The executive added that the multinational has been working on AI for several years and spent billions of dollars on the predictive AI side, and added that the generative AI would be a game-changing market.

Last month, Cisco, as a part of its AI-driven strategy, unveiled artificial intelligence-based security policy management that it said could deploy firewall policies more intelligently.