Cisco is looking at OpenAI’s latest Codex artificial intelligence (AI) coding agent to help the increasingly AI-forward networking giant to squeeze more AI-generated efficiency from its operations.

OpenAI’s Codex is a cloud-based platform that acts as a software engineering agent working “on many tasks in parallel.” This includes “writing features, answering questions about your codebase, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests for review.” Those functions are each performed in their own “cloud sandbox environment” and use data preloaded from a company’s repository.

Jeetu Patel, who was recently promoted from chief product officer of Cisco’s networking business to that same position over all of Cisco’s operations, wrote in a blog post that the vendor is “exploring how Codex can help our engineering teams bring ambitious ideas to life faster.”

Patel explained that this exploration is based on the potential of driving a 10-times increase in productivity from “the human workforce,” with this focus on software development. “Software engineering is incredibly high-leverage,” Patel noted. “Being able to develop, de-bug, improve, and manage code with AI is a force-multiplier for every company in every industry.”

Cisco’s view from a technology perspective is that Codex highlights the agentic future of AI.

“We envision a future where billions of AI agents are working together harmoniously on our behalf, around the globe and around the clock,” Patel noted, adding that this will shine a brighter focus on network constraints. “None of this will work without ultra-fast, low-latency, energy-efficient, and highly secure networks.”

Patel’s words were conveniently echoed by Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, who during the vendor’s most recent earnings call explained that Cisco’s evolving AI-related revenues showed “the growing importance of our technology to web-scale customers for their AI training use cases.”

“With agentic AI, the network is fundamentally constrained and will require ultrafast, low-latency, energy-efficient networks, which we can deliver,” Robbins added.

Is it about cutting jobs?

Patel also stepped around the human impact from implementing AI-infused coding technology like Codex.

“As an AI infrastructure company, we must attract the best developers in the world to Cisco. That can only happen if they can do their life’s best work with us,” Patel wrote. “We want Cisco to be a company where engineers have the best tooling in the world and are empowered to fundamentally reimagine how they write code.”

Microsoft recently announced plans to cut thousands of jobs, which reports indicate include a large number of software engineers. Cisco last year also announced thousands of job cuts tied to its broader refocus on AI, security, and the cloud.

Cisco CFO Scott Herren at that time attempted to add color to the job cuts by stating that the “reduction” is “much more of a reallocation versus a headcount savings.”

“In some cases, the efficiencies that we're going to get will be from by moving into lower cost locations,” Herren said.

Analyst firms have picked up on this trend of replacing human developers with AI, though question the long-term benefits.

“In the near-term it is doubtful that agents can meaningfully deliver on so many tech executives’ (usually implicit) suggestions of operational cost savings and cost avoidance,” Kate Holteroff, senior industry analyst at RedMonk noted in a recent blog post. “Regardless of whether CEOs are candid or evasive about AI’s potential to reduce their customer’s workforce, the reality of this promise has not yet panned out. For now, AI represents a human assistant and AI agents specifically still require human oversight.”

Despite the potential drama, Cisco’s growing AI push is paying off for the networking giant. The vendor reported that AI drove $600 million in new infrastructure related sales from webscale customers during Cisco’s third-fiscal quarter, which when combined with the $700 million in sales already pocketed for the year, pushed Cisco’s total well past its initial forecast of $1 billion in total sales for its fiscal year.

The latest sales numbers were parsed out as being roughly two-thirds from Cisco-branded networking systems and one-third from silicon and optics. That break out was more networking heavy than initial AI-related sales, which were more evenly split between those two operating segments.