2 'grossly underestimated' skills that will be valuable in the next era of engineering, according to Cisco's CPO

• Cisco has about 27,000 engineers and is "unapologetically hiring" more, CPO Jeetu Patel told BI.
• He said that AI automation tools, like OpenAI's Codex, are reshaping the role of engineers.
• Having a strong skillset in agent workflow and idea quality is "grossly underestimated," Patel said.

It's no secret that the role of engineers is changing — and in some cases, shrinking.

That's not the case at Cisco, though, the company's president and chief product officer, Jeetu Patel, told Business Insider in an interview — at least, not yet. The company has 27,000 engineers and is "unapologetically hiring" more, he said.

"We feel more constrained now than ever before on not having enough engineers to get prosecuted all the ideas that we've got going internally," Patel said.

Patel isn't denying that AI advancements will redefine the role of engineers, though. Cisco recently partnered with OpenAI for design testing on its new Codex AI coding assistant, which offloads repetitive tasks and performs tasks like writing code, fixing bugs, and running tests. Patel said Codex will allow companies to pair human software engineers with an AI counterpart.

Understanding the nuanced details of syntax in coding language will still be important, Patel said, but there will be less emphasis on it in the future. He said that skill won't be "consequential" in the next five years.

Two other skills, which are "grossly underestimated," will take precedent, the CPO told BI.

Patel said one of those will be "orchestrating agent workflow." That will involve overseeing a whole family of agents who talk to each other to ensure they solve problems. Salesforce EVP of talent growth and development, Lori Castillo Martinez, similarly said in an earlier interview with BI that it's more important than ever to know which tasks are best suited for agents and humans. She said the best managers are those who can analyze teams and maximize productivity.

"That will be super important," Patel said about orchestrating agent workflow.

Patel said the second skill that will become valuable is "quality of ideas." It appears that engineers will need to have a lot of them.

Patel said tools like Codex "unlock" human imagination so that the "scarcity of developers" doesn't constrain companies from innovating. The CPO said that AI augmentation will make engineers 10 to 50 times as productive, with engineers spending more time thinking and less time fixing bugs. Patel said the speed at which an idea becomes a product will go from months to minutes.

Dropbox VP of product and growth, Morgan Brown, previously shared similar advice with BI. In the age of AI, he said product managers should focus more on what he referred to as the "deep work," adding that companies are eager to have more great ideas.

Patel said that this evolution will improve "output capacity, but also the satisfaction that someone gets from a job."

"The only constraint becomes their imagination," Patel said.