Cisco President Jeetu Patel and WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh on the Role of AI, Cloud and Cyber in Digital Transformation

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT Co-founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh and Cisco President Jeetu Patel break down the real constraints shaping the AI era and explore why platforms will define the next decade of enterprise innovation. They'll also talk about how secure, scalable architectures enable organizations to innovate confidently and compete at AI speed.

Editor's Note: This special episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast was recorded during WWT's Business Innovation Summit, which took place at the PGA TOUR's World Wide Technology Championship in November 2025. 

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why This Matters
• 3:05 Not Hype. Momentum.
• 4:33 The Real Constraints
• 9:56 Agents Change the Math
• 13:15 Trust Isn’t Optional
• 17:45 Cisco’s Advantage
• 22:10 Lessons from the Last Cycle
• 24:54 The 10x Reality Check
• 29:30 AI Tools or Bust
• 34:05 The Model Is the Product
• 38:12 Culture: Choose Curiosity
• 41:55 Communicating the Shift

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

From Worldwide Technology, this is the AI Proving Ground Podcast. We're living through an AI moment defined less by clever demos and more by hard constraints. There isn't enough power, compute, or network in the world to match the demand we're already seeing. Security is no longer an afterthought, it's the price of admission. And most enterprises are realizing their data mode is at best half-built. So today, we'll be hearing from two visionary leaders, Cisco President G2 Patel, and WWT co-founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh, about the leadership decisions, cultural shifts, and technology bets that separate organizations that are experimenting with AI from those transforming because of it. This conversation actually took place just a few weeks ago at WWT's Business Innovation Summit, which curated some of the most engaging and influential minds in business and technology today, and equip leaders with the clarity, conviction, and playbook to compete and win in an AI-defined future. So without further ado, let's hear from Jim and G20.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10

Now we get started.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29

Thank you. So again, uh appreciate you being here. It's an honor. What I wanted to kick it off, G2 just came uh back or from Cisco's Partner Summit. And uh, you know, just the feedback that I've received from our team that was.

SPEAKER_02: 1:49

It sounds like the WWT summit because you guys won almost every award.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54

Well, that's we're gonna talk about that later. But uh no. Uh but no, thank you. It's the the feedback was great and the energy was amazing. And and maybe I'm gonna start with two questions, G2. Uh you know, when you think about today, obviously a big topic is where is AI, and you think about what AI is is the impact it's having uh just on the world in general, on business. And then also think about like where Cisco is. And and you know, we've talked about it a little bit last night. Cisco is reinventing itself, and you're driving a lot of this being a president, chief product officer, chief innovation officer for uh for Cisco. So when you think about AI, what's your view on AI? There's a lot of discussions around, you know, there's a bubble building, there's uh challenge, you know, what should we be watching for? And then, you know, how are you looking at you know AI internally and and and thinking about how do you need to move? And you know, how do you are you thinking differently, moving faster? So I'll just kind of open it up.

SPEAKER_02: 3:01

So one of the lessons that I learned early in my career is whenever there's a mega trend, you never fight it. You always use it as a tailwind. You know, and um uh and the the only important thing is you have to know the difference between a mega trend and a hype cycle. And um, this one is definitely not a hype cycle, it's a mega trend. Now, by the way, there's a lot of questions that get asked on are we in a bubble? Uh, is this kind of a very frothy valuation? I I will say there will be some companies that'll actually have frothy valuations in any kind of platform shift like this, you see a lot of experimentation. There's irrational exuberance that happens for a while for some companies. But if in general, um, what I'd say is we are actually underestimating um the level of potential in the long term. So I personally feel like the data center build-outs that you see are actually getting underhyped compared to being overhyped because of the amount of capacity that's going to be required to fulfill the needs of AI. We're nowhere near where we need to be. So that would be my my initial kind of take.

SPEAKER_01: 4:06

Um, the second thing I'd say is NG2 on it, are you actually seeing that today?

SPEAKER_02: 4:12

Uh look, I think we'll probably have like five, six trillion dollars. There'll be tens of gigawatts of capacity that'll be built out worldwide. Um and I don't think that's gonna be enough. And um uh and the reason for that is look, OpenAI has 800 billion users right now on a monthly basis. The reason they're not 1.6 billion is not because 1.6 billion people don't want to use Chat GPT, it's because they literally don't have infrastructure to serve up 1.6 billion people effectively today. And so they're building out capacity. Like there is a massive shortage that's there. So if if if I were to think about, you know, what are the constraints that might hold back AI? I would say there's there's three. The first one is I think there's a massive infrastructure constraint where there's just not enough power, compute, and network capacity and network bandwidth in the world to go out and satiate the needs of AI. And especially as we move to the second phase of AI, from the chatbot era where people ask questions and intelligently got answers to that felt like magic three years ago that now completely feels like normal place, to now agents being able to conduct tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on behalf of humans. I think when that's that seven by 24 cycle is gonna have a very different pattern of inferencing. It's gonna be much more sustained than spiky, you know, because the agents are gonna be working all day long and all night long. And on average, you'll have probably 10 to 100 agents for every human. And so the capacity is just gonna be very different that's gonna be needed. So the first constraint is infrastructure. The second big constraint is um a trust deficit. I think if people don't trust these systems, they're never gonna use them. Um if this is the first time that security is actually a prerequisite for adoption. In the past, you always said, do you want to be productive or do you want to be secure? This is the first time that people are are actually saying that if I don't feel safe with the use of these systems, chances are I'm not gonna use them. So the trust deficit's a real issue. We got to secure AI itself in order to make this happen because these models are unpredictable. They hallucinate. Hallucination is a great feature when you're writing poetry, it's really bad when you're doing security, you know? Um, and then the third area is a data gap, where I think every company right now that's over here probably thinks that your data is your moat. But most people don't have the scaffolding and the tooling to be able to make sure that they can organize the data in the right way to really be able to harness the right level of uh value out of it. So those three are kind of meaningful um constraints. And the way that Cisco thinks about it is we are squarely in the middle of all of those three in being able to provide high performance, low latency, um, you know, kind of power efficient networking that actually interconnects the GPUs. Um, you know, if if I think about power is the constraint, GPU is the asset, network is a force multiplier that can really make it um make it real. We provide um, you know, security capabilities, and then we of course have um a data platform with Splunk that really can help machine data get harnessed in a very different way, where if you start correlating time series data with human-generated data, you'll have a very, very different kind of outcome.

SPEAKER_01: 7:38

It's awesome. No, it's a it's a great uh kind of big picture depiction of what's going on. And and I I would have to agree that uh there are probably more constraints, but it's moving so fast and it's so big, it is causing comparisons and I, you know, to the dot-com days, which I think it's very, very different.

SPEAKER_02: 7:58

But I do think, though, that the way that we think about AI is in my mind slightly um, you know, linear. And we think about AI right now as well. It's gonna be this great mechanism that aggregates all the human knowledge that's there, and it's gonna distill it down and give it to you in a very organized form and natural language. I don't think that's the biggest advancement that AI is gonna be able to contribute. I think the biggest advancement is there will be original insights that get generated that didn't exist in the human corpus of knowledge that allow us to solve problems we didn't even deem possible to solve before. The way that we solve curing cancer, the way that we solve longevity of life, the way that we solve poverty, these are gonna be massive problems that actually couldn't be solved quite the way that we had imagined. And so our assumption set will need to be completely refactored. And and that, in my mind, is is an exciting world to live in. And I think the narrative that we have right now is far too reductive. Like, well, AI is gonna take my jobs. I mean, AI is not gonna take your job. Someone using AI better than you will definitely take your job, you know. And so Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 9:05

So so speak of that, speaking of that, you know, thinking about some things maybe just fundamentally within the company. You you and I have talked about uh, you know, how we're using AI internally, how you're doing it to drive innovation. Uh, let's talk a little bit about, you know, we can talk in big pictures, macro views of things going on and and uh trends, but let's get specific to what you're looking at. You you know, you and I have talked about how you and the industry should be thinking about using uh call it AI coding assistance, whether it's IDEs on the front end or these back-end coding models, and there's a number of them that are evolving today. A lot of venture money, a lot of private equity, a lot of money going into these coding platforms. And they're very early stage. And, you know, you've heard some people say, you know, software developers are not going to be needed. I think that's BS, to be perfectly honest. I think they're gonna be needed more than ever. It's just they're gonna need to be trained differently. So a little bit we're talking to G2, and again, I love talking to G2 on just a number of different things, but we were talking a couple of weeks ago, and you basically went through and you're like, yeah, I want, you know, 10x out of my developers. And I'll just leave it at that. Maybe you give a little perspective of how you're looking at the 25,000 engineers that you have in developers and your perspective on your expectation of what you're doing internally. Not, you know, externally and what everybody should be doing, but what you're specifically looking at and kind of the mindset around innovation and leveraging the technology and AI capability around software development.

SPEAKER_02: 10:47

I think like if you think we, I mean, we're a tech company, our currency is the amount of time that engineers have to go out and build great products that customers love, that they talk to their friends and family about, that get to some level of you know, meaningful adoption and get to commercial relevance. And if you, you know, when we sit back and look at it, we have 25,000 engineers, and there's not a single person that doesn't feel constrained for resources at Cisco. In fact, the number of budget requests I get from people, there's a few people from Cisco over here, it's um um it's it's it's a very high request on please give me more resources so I can do more. And so if those 25,000 people can operate like we have the throughput capacity of 250,000 people, you actually solve a lot of problems. Now, the goal is not to get rid of half of those people, because I'm not idea constrained, I'm execution constrained. And so we should just make sure that we can actually drive more throughput. And so then the question becomes um, how do you drive more throughput with uh AI coding? And I'd say that the first thing that we had to do was shift the mental model because everyone would look at where AI was today and say, G2, it doesn't work for these 15 things, so we can't use it. And they're actually right. If you look at AI today, it works really well for debugging, it really well works well for code migration, it works really well for um you know zero-to-one products. You start to do memory management in the lower bowels of the infrastructure, it's not that great yet. But the the mental model shift that we had to make with our engineers was in three months, it's gonna be very different. And you have to make sure that you actually adjust your perspective to what AI is gonna be able to do in three months from now rather than doing it right now. And what are you gonna do to make sure that you become the leader in three months? Because the really scary aspect is missing a wave. Look, Cisco um had done an amazing job in the early years of our business. We completely missed the cloud wave, right? Um, and then we started getting seen as a legacy company that these guys are a has been company. And now we've gotten the spring in our step back. And the reason for that is because the formula is pretty simple. Any company, you don't need to get permission to innovate. You just any company just needs to build great products that put a smile on people's faces, and you can actually start to see a turnaround that happens. Look at what's happened with Oracle, look at what's happened with um um with so many of these companies that actually weren't um the cat's meow for a long time, and then all of a sudden you have a shift and a platform shift that occurs, and you can actually make sure that you could have a very logical insertion point. Well, Cisco is no different on that front, but what we needed to do was make sure that we had an instinct for how this movement was going to happen, and we could not be sitting on the sidelines talking about AI and not using AI. So we became the first design partner for open AI. Um, we use um uh cursor, we use codex. And what I've mentioned to our team of engineers is if in 18 months you're not using AI to develop code, you're probably not relevant for the future of Cisco. And I think we have to be completely definitive on that dimension, even if the technology today might not be there. Because what's happening right now that's really different in product development is the model is the product. You don't have the the companies that are gonna be like when you say who has the frothy valuations, any company that has a thin shim on top of a model, I think those companies will be out of business. I don't think they're gonna be that relevant. But if you have a model and that model continues to keep improving, the feedback loop between the modern the model and product is very tight, you will actually start to see that in three months you'll be surprised at how fat how far this thing goes. And so when we started looking at codecs, and Kevin's here, he's one of our leaders in the um in the data center business. You know, I literally had a large group of engineers saying, G dude, this just isn't gonna work. And then all of a sudden, in two or three weeks after that, you know, Kevin Wheel is on a board, he was the chief product officer of OpenAI. He's now running research over there. And I talked to Kevin. I'm like, Kevin, it seems like we can't do these five things. And he's like, All right, give me two weeks. And then in two weeks, those five things started to work. And then before you knew it, employees started coming to me saying, Hey, in the past two or three weeks, things have materially changed.

SPEAKER_01: 15:31

And that that that topic alone, I mean, and we see this all the time. How fast the technology is moving, how fast these models are moving. And there were problems even inside of worldwide that were AI use cases that we are almost on a point of punting and saying, we're done with that. And all of a sudden the model had a bit of a breakthrough, solved the problem, and we're moving down the road on that use case in a more compelling way.

SPEAKER_02: 15:56

And that I think is the most important mental model for enterprises to keep in mind is just because something doesn't work today does not mean it won't work in three months. And I'm not talking about nine months, twelve months, eighteen months. It literally will be a completely different state in three months. So you have to keep adjusting yourselves and the mental model so that within a very short compressed amount of time, the cycle of time will change and the output outcomes are going to change. And if you can construct a culture that is not one of constant level of cynicism that something doesn't work, but constantly searching for possibilities where you can make something work within a very compressed amount of time, you will change your entire trajectory of the business.

SPEAKER_01: 16:40

So on Ed G2, how are you looking at it within Cisco? Because I think a lot of our customers, partners here, you know, one of the challenges around AI is is it's the communication from the top. It's what are you communicating to your company? How are you communicating? We talked about this last night. Uh are you communicating that we're driving AI to cut headcount and cut cost? Are you using AI to actually create opportunity, to drive innovation, to build new products? So I think the mentality of how you are looking to do this in a way, again, to your developers. We even talked, you know, be quiet here for, but you've, you know, even brought up and said, well, you get them all where they are all like incredibly proficient on these AI coding tools and capabilities. You're like, I am quite confident we're not going to run out of ideas. I am not we are not jarred on ideas and development efforts that need to be done. So I'm kind of curious, the how are you communicating this? How are you changing the order? Because you even mentioned with Cisco, a little bit looked at it's like, oh, that's old school. Cisco is is not leading. So the the mentality, the communication, et cetera.

SPEAKER_02: 17:55

In my mind, being old school is a choice, right? And you can actually choose to not be that way at any point in time. Like there's nothing that says that you have to be a startup in Silicon Valley that's less than 50 people in order to be cool. Big big folks can be cool, you know? Um, and so um uh so we just had to make a choice to say we're gonna go do amazing things that wow our customers, and anyone that doesn't want to be on the train, I respect them. They just don't belong on the train. And so the the very clear guidance we've given to our employee base is if you don't use AI to augment the way that you work and materially enhance the throughput that you do on a daily basis, chances are you're not gonna be relevant for the market, and you definitely won't be relevant for Cisco. Um, and that's not me being an asshole, it's just me saying, it's just it's just a fact because like there's only going to be two kinds of companies relevant and dexterous with the use of AI, and ones that struggle for relevance. And we want to be the first kind, and that requires every single one of our employees to be in that camp. And so we had a 75,000 employee all hands one time, and someone asked me saying, Well, is it okay for us to be skeptical about AI? I'm like, categorically, positively not. You can be skeptical about the approach we're taking if we can take a different approach. But if you're debating whether or not AI is a good idea, man, I don't need to waste those cycles right now because like we might be wrong, but we're not going to be confused. And I think you have to be you know extremely definitive on that dimension.

SPEAKER_01: 19:39

You know, it's it's it's interesting. So maybe how do you how do you look at you've kind of changed the the communication, you look at where Cisco is now, and maybe a little bit of your view of how you were changing Cisco more into a platform. Uh, and you talk about just coming off Partner Summit. I mean, you know, the the buzz is good. Cisco, I I believe you look at your stock. Personally, it's starting to move again. Uh, I don't know if that means anything to you or not, but uh uh they don't pay me much. Yeah, I asked them to. Yeah, yes. Uh but you know, kind of your your view of where is Cisco going, how would you describe the investments that you are and how you're gonna positively impact a lot of our clients out here. You talked about the deployment of AI and how you're looking at trying to simplify the approach into more of a platform company uh and then driving you know and enabling AI.

SPEAKER_02: 20:35

Let me let me just start with it, all starts from people. Like I have um I have a mental framework that I use, which is in order for becoming a great company, six things have to come together. You know, the first thing is timing has to be right. A lot of great products at the wrong time um are you know collecting dust. Um, so you have to have the right timing. Number two, you have to be in the right market that's a large enough market that you can attack bit by bit. You can't go out and attack the entire market all at once. So, and these these are kind of in descending order of importance, but if you don't have all six, you don't win, right? So timing has to be right. You don't control timing. You have to be in a large market, market always wins. Number three, then, is team. You have to have a great team. Oftentimes people tell me, isn't team more important than market? No. You've actually got an amazing market mediocre team, market pulls you up. You've got a shitty market and um uh a great team, market drags you down. Market always wins. So it's timing, market, team. Number four is you have to have a great product. I believe product is the soul of a company. Why I think it's actually borderline unethical to sell mediocre products because you've got great distribution. Like it doesn't make any sense. Like the world doesn't need more mediocre products in the market. There's plenty of them out there. So you should build something that's great. So number four is product. Number five is you gotta have a brand that that has enough trust in it. Like one of my mentors had told me, don't ever go to a company who's lost their brand mojo. Like, do you think Cybase is ever coming back? Zero chance. Right? And so um number five is brand, and number six is distribution. And timing Trump's market, market trump's team, team Trump's product, product trumps brand, brand trump's distribution. You don't have all six, you don't win. And we luckily in Cisco at this point in time happen to have all six in spades. So that was the first thing that I had to assess saying, is this something that's a winnable?

SPEAKER_01: 22:32

Sounds like you've said that before because I could not even it's like that was really good. And I'm like, did somebody catch that? I'm like, holy cow, is he actually gonna make this? That's I was just impressed anyway. That was me talking out loud.

SPEAKER_02: 22:44

So I was like so so that that that was the first thing. The second thing is I actually fundamentally believe that people want to come into the uh their their jobs every day wanting to do a good job. So I feel like whenever leaders start blaming their people for it, it's usually a leadership issue, it's not a people issue. And so you just got to make sure that you've got the right clarity of um of direction that you want to go, and then you have to make sure that you um you have you lead by example because I don't expect anyone to work harder than me. Uh and um even though I believe I don't get paid enough, I get paid more than them. And so like we should actually make sure that we're actually putting enough of our own sweat equity in there and don't just you know be uh shouting out orders. You should always be there, rolling up your sleeves with them. So that was the second. And then came the substance on the third one, which is Cisco had become a holding company. We had like made 237 acquisitions. Um, everyone wanted to build their own fiefdom. The way that you actually saw people progressing up the career was everyone wanted to be a GM of their own little domain, and it had become an incomprehensible company. You had no freaking idea what we stood for because every BU would talk about something different. And so the first thing we had to do was say we don't want to be a holding company because our breath had become a liability, and we needed our breath to become one of the most defensible assets, you know, because we are one of the few companies that has networking and security and uh data and observability and collaboration, and like it's a very broad portfolio that actually ties together pretty well in helping build out data centers, helping build out the future of workplaces, helping have resilience and infrastructure. So we said, let's let's make sure that we actually have a platform advantage that's created. Now, what is a platform advantage? Platform advantage means that your marginal cost of ingestion of every new technology has to go down precipitously so that, and every single new technology you buy, you don't just buy it for what that brings to the table, but you also buy it for the things that you might already have from that company that can it can add value to. So there has to be a compounding effect, right? So we said, let's make sure that we create a platform advantage. And there's gonna be a bunch of things we we had to do four years, five years ago in order to create this platform that was tightly integrated but loosely coupled. Because you couldn't be arrogant enough to think that customers are only gonna use Cisco head to toe for everything. We had to make sure that we had an insertion point and they could they didn't have to buy the entire platform to succeed from us. But boy, when you do buy two things from us, they work like magic. You know, and that's what we wanted to do. So that was the the um the second thing we did is create a platform advantage. And the third thing, which was a very counterintuitive thing for Cisco, was we had to make sure that we operated in an open ecosystem and didn't get arrogant enough to think that we were the only ones and we had to build a walled garden and everyone that we competed with were bad people. Because the reality is, is there is a it is much more fun growing the pie than getting a bigger piece of a small pie. And so what we did was we actually um created this complete shift internally of saying we're gonna partner even with our largest competitors, and that's okay. Uh and the reason to do that is because if you start thinking about the customer first and work backwards, it actually will help you serve the customer better, which will then in turn help you serve yourself better. And the reality is anyone that owns more than 20% market share that you don't integrate with, all you're doing is excluding yourself from that 20% of the market. Right? And so why not integrate with them? And so the the way that this came about was Microsoft Teams was gaining a lot of momentum. We had WebEx, we all believed that WebEx was a better product, but Teams was gaining momentum. You're like, what if we figured out a model where when Teams wins, we win? Right? And so our hardware devices, which actually have an NVIDIA chipset, the most gorgeous industrial design devices of anyone. By the way, if you don't use Cisco's devices, that is a really bad decision that was made by someone. We should change that. Um but we actually tied it to Microsoft Teams, we tied it to Zoom, we tied it to um um uh Google, and we tied it to WebEx. And before you knew it, we became the open platform, and now we're selling hundreds of millions of dollars on the coattails of Microsoft and Zoom, and actually we're getting an insertion point for getting WebEx sold into those accounts as well. And that just requires a mindset where there's not a good and evil. You actually might compete with someone, but it's okay to partner with them because as the market gets bigger, it's gonna be impossible to find people you don't might not have some competitive element with. And it's not serving your customer in the right way. If they've invested in two companies and you're one of those companies, and you don't cooperate with the customer to go out and integrate with someone else so that they can get the best return from their investment. So it just seemed like it made a lot of sense to have that open ecosystem. And I think we've done that as a guiding principle for us, and I think it's fundamentally shifted the narrative, it's fundamentally shifted the culture, and it's fundamentally shifted the way the customers look at us. So if you haven't looked at Cisco in the past couple of years, it's an entirely different company. We'd encourage you to kind of, you know, reach out to us and we'd love to kind of walk you through what we've done. And I think we've really proud of what the team's done so far.

SPEAKER_01: 28:30

Yeah, uh great job uh with that, G2, because I can tell you, you know, obviously being the largest and what we believe is uh the most strategic partner with Cisco, uh the feedback I get from our collective team is that again, Cisco has that jump in your step, you know, you have your jump in the step, you have the energy, you have, and it's to your point, you can go out and you could be the best presenter, you can get on stage and create all the energy and route, but if you don't have the product behind it to deliver, that is very short-lived. And, you know, as you mentioned in your six steps, uh, which I got to go back and watch that again, but uh uh the six steps to success. Uh uh, but if you really look at it, if you you talk about you, you can communicate this, but if you don't have the substance, and that's where I think G2 has done an amazing job at Cisco, he's been painting the picture and the vision, but also delivering on the back end, and that is the heavy lift, you know, that is is required. So from our perspective, again, I would I would recommend customers to take Cisco up on the challenge of relook at where Cisco is today and where they're going and what they can do for you. And that's how we're looking at it and watching, because I think they are, you know, becoming a much more innovative company and delivering things and really thinking out of the box, as G2 even mentioned. Because specifically remember, you know, whether it's Zoom. Or it's you know Microsoft Teams, or how are we how are you going to do this? Because there's creating this confusion. So maybe I'm going to pivot just to touch uh on a few things and we wanted to open up for a few questions here in a minute. But I wanted to give a little perspective because the the mindset I have in G2, I think epitomizes uh a lot of this is that, you know, all of us at every level, any one of us, think that we've got this stuff figured out and we're done learning and you know, we've gone through our schooling or we're at this position. Uh, the the the world is moving so fast, the tech is moving so fast. We we kind of talked about this last night. How do you stay abreast of it? And not and kind of in two ways that I look at it. That one, there are things that are going on within Cisco that are traditional Cisco. And G2, you are up to your ears in this and leading that charge and driving results. But also, you're taking the time to go out and look at other companies that may not completely be in the space where Cisco is around AI, around next generation things. It could be quantum, it could be other things that you're watching and you're paying attention to those things. So, how are you, as a leader, uh staying abreast of this and creating this continuous learning loop? We talked about podcasts and different things. Uh so how do you look at it from staying on top of this and really this continuous learning loop that uh on a personal level?

SPEAKER_02: 31:30

The first thing I've been blessed with is I just don't have any hobbies. And so it works out really well. Like, you know, you folks all play golf. I've never played golf. I played golf one time with Keith Mitchell. I think he almost quit golf because of that. So like he's you know, so I I I tend to um get most of my joy in my life from my 14-year-old daughter and um from um, you know, learning. And I actually find this to be a very common trait in human psychology, which is most people get really energized when they start learning. However, the discouraging part is when learning gets hard, most people don't actually sit through all the way and get to the end. And that's a very unsatisfying, unfulfilling portion of time when you um when you kind of give up prematurely. And so for me, I've been very lucky in the sense that early on, I'll maybe I'll tell you a personal story on how this changed. So I, you know, my my my dad was a high-stakes criminal when I grew up in India. I had to escape India. I came over here, and I was um living with my uncle, and we were like um he he was he had given me a job at uh as a data entry person at his office um when I first came in. And I used to, we we never learned how to type in India. So I would type with two fingers, and it was a really painful thing to watch a data entry person not know how to type. And and and one day he told me, he's like, Gito, I'm having a really hard time justifying minimum wage of$4.25 an hour for you. Because buddy, your typing speed is not much to brag about. And it was like, it was very offensive, in all honesty. And so this was like in December, you know, there was um, there was gonna be like um, they they were gonna go out of town for holidays. I was staying with them. I'm like, you know, I'm gonna stay stay home. Like, why? I'm like, I just have a lot of school work to do, I'm just gonna stay home. They said, okay, so for three days, I was home. And in 72 hours, I walked in with 20 words a minute, and I just typed for three days. That's all I did. I slept for like four hours a night and I just typed, and I walked out at 90 words a minute at the end of 72 hours. Um thank you. I and the the the unlock that happened in my brain at that point, because I was I wasn't a good student in India. There was a lot of trauma with like my my growing up and all of that. That when I came here, I'm like, you know, um, the unlock that happened for me was if I put my mind to doing something, and the second thing was I used to stutter and I started waiting on tables. And when I was waiting on tables and I would I I I it automatically my stuttering went away because you realize that you're not gonna make tips if you don't entertain the table. And I used to work at a fine dining establishment called Sizzler. I don't know if any of you have been there. It's steak and all you can eat shrimp for$7.99. You know, it was it was pretty good. But those two kind of seminal moments in my life actually gave me that it is learning, it is a choice. And if I decide to learn, virtually anything that I don't have experience in doesn't really matter because I can gain experience. And in fact, experience in a lot of jobs becomes a liability because you get intellectual arrogance with experience, and you start thinking, well, this pattern is not gonna work because I've seen it before five years ago. But like 50 freaking variables changed in five years, that that assumption is wrong. And so you almost need to unlearn as much as you're learning. And if you do that right, then everything starts to point up into the right over time if you have enough persistence and grit. So I that kind of mental model has actually worked out pretty well for me over time because every single time I feel like, well, I don't know X, Y, Z, I just think about my typing days, you know, and I'm like, in 72 hours, I went from 20 to 90. And I I actually, it was interesting because in college I started typing papers for people because I got so good at it and that I would make more money on the side because I learned how to type that weekend. And and that tells you that the human mind is an amazing sponge if you allow it to be, or it can be an amazing cynic. And it's okay to be skeptical, but I think when you're cynical for too long, like you start going sideways pretty fast. And so what I would do is I would just try to keep myself into the learning mode at all times. And with AI, it became really interesting because like people will ask me at Cisco, they're like, Well, what are you gonna do to give us training tools for AI? I'm like, Are you freaking hearing yourself? Like, literally, the premise of AI is you go to Chat GPT, you ask a question, and you get back an answer. Why the hell do you need training tools? Bulkers, you know, and so we just started doing uh and so anyway.

SPEAKER_01: 36:31

But but but but you know, it it it's it's it's a really interesting point. Uh and you know, it's amazing. I've known GT for some time now, and there's stories that I'm hearing here that I've got to dig deeper in on a couple of things. Uh uh But when you when you think about, I think like the wave of moving forward, it is the curious and inquisitive mind is the mind that's going to win. And you know, just as you you described, I'm like, you know, there's so much opportunity here. If you have no curiosity, if you have no desire to learn, and even going to your point, well, you're you're the president of Cisco and you're chief product. You don't need to listen or watch or learn from anything. I mean, you watch a lot of TV. I know.

SPEAKER_02: 37:13

I mean very short-lived presidency. Yeah. You didn't learn.

SPEAKER_01: 37:16

No, as you said, you know, how much TV do you watch and what do you do? Just kind of curious. You know, one, you've you've mentioned a couple things. You try to set up a meeting with somebody outside, and also uh maybe kind of a little insight on your podcast uh uh mania that you maybe like one thing I do for learning is uh once a week I meet with someone outside of Cisco.

SPEAKER_02: 37:38

Because I think in large companies you can tend to get very insular, and then you get caught up in the internal politics, and there's always going to be bozos you don't like working with in any company.

SPEAKER_01: 37:46

I got a cup, but oh sorry. That was another that's uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 37:51

But like you can you you can't get yourself in a cynical state. And so one thing you have to do is surround yourself with people like I have Sheer, who's my chief of staff. Stand up, Sheer. Um so soer is someone who is uh very um stingy with compliments to me. There's very few times in her life that she's told me, Gita, you've done something well. But what she does is keeps it real for me because what what we can get to be, we can tend to be is become very insular in large companies. So what I do is I will tend to have at least one dinner with someone, ideally a startup CEO or a startup, you know, person, because it's completely out of the world that I live in on a day-to-day basis to just learn from them on how they're thinking about life. Right. And um, and that and then I try I try to have a rule which is just learn one thing from the dinner that you can take back. But don't walk away from the dinner without learning one thing. So like if we've spent three hours and not learned a thing, spend the fourth hour, but get one thing out of them. You know, so that's that's one kind of piece I keep in mind. And second, I I I I just I mean, I like romantic comedies every once in a while, but that's like that's very embarrassing to say for a 54-year-old grown man. And so then I just watch like podcasts because it's like much easier. So like learning-wise, I feel like there's so much tooling and content available in the market that uh just staying up to speed at what's happening in the industry is actually a superpower that's massively underrated, you know. And um, and if you can do that with the right level of tempo, cadence, and then bringing you know three or four different areas that you might have experience in and stitching them together that no one else does, you actually bring about a very unique perspective. And every human has that ability. We just sometimes choose not to use it. So, you know, it's just um I I just tend to keep pushing myself on doing that piece of it. And then I'd say the last thing I've found that's you know been a guiding light for me is going back to the India story, I hadn't gone back to India from like 1991 when I left until like 2017. I went back for two days when my dad passed away in 2004, but otherwise I hadn't gone back to India because I didn't feel it was safe. So I went back in 2017, took my my daughter with me, and we went to the Taj Mahal. And this was like a really interesting eye-opening thing. And you know, we had this tour guide, his name was Raj, and he was like showing us the Taj Mahal. The guy was a great product guy because I don't know if he was making this shit up, but he had a lot of good stories about the Taj Mahal. And so we would uh he was telling us all the stories about like what happened and all of that, and every single time like someone would walk by, he would bust out in a different language and talk. He'd talk to someone in Mandarin, talk to someone in Spanish, talk to someone in German, talk to someone in French. Um, and at some point I'm like, dude, how many languages do you speak? And he said something ridiculous, like 12 or 14 languages, but he said, I learn a new language every year. I'm like, oh, and this guy makes like, mind you, like 10 bucks an hour or something, right? Or 10 bucks a day, not even an hour. Um, and so I'm like, wow, you speak you learn a new language every year. Why is that? And he's like, Well, I feel like I have to honor the tourists that come to my country, and I don't want to be presumptuous enough to think that they're gonna speak my language. I need to learn their language so I can honor them. And I'm thinking I used to work at Box at the time, and I'm thinking this guy is categorically smarter than any ELT member we have at Box. And he's just as smart as any sales rep, but he's making 10 bucks a day. And the reason for that is because I've been afforded a platform, and he has not been afforded a platform. Like I've been afforded the platform of um America, of education, of tech, of um the startup community, uh, and and someone who is just as hardworking, just as intelligent, if not more, uh, just as hungry, just as curious, probably doesn't have that. And so, you know, it's one thing if you have if you don't have a platform and you don't make it and don't have an impact on the world. But man, if you have a platform and you start getting cynical and don't take advantage of the platform, shame on you. You know? And so that's when I had set my mind to say, I am so fortunate to have one of the best platforms in the world with every single company I've worked with, every single leader that's mentored me, every friend I have, that we should make sure that we take advantage of this platform and build something great for the world so that you leave the world a better place than when you found it. And if you could do that, like life is fulfilling, it's more fun to live, and you actually make more money, which is not entirely that bad.

SPEAKER_01: 42:59

You know? No, wow, that's that's that's fantastic, G2. I mean, so many things, honestly, that you know, I look at a lot of a lot of the same things that you mentioned. I mean, there's more to it. Talked about, you know, is it a job, is it a career, is it a passion, you know, that you have? And this is clearly a passion. And I think reflecting back on the opportunity that we we all have, you know, and and the thing that I look at, it's it's just it's also that, you know, if you mentioned here, you want people around you that are going to challenge you and that are gonna call you out. And, you know, I think it's to me, it's like so much of I I look at, I don't take for granted the incredible culture and and people that we have within worldwide, and then the relationships extended outside of worldwide. I'm like, I do not take this for granted. And to sit up here with you and and what is also amazing, and you know, we got a couple of minutes to open up some questions, but to your point, G2, it is amazing to me. Just enjoy talking to people and just sitting up here and listening to G2. You know, it's amazing what you learn about people if you ask questions, if you are actually interested in them. To think about the the individual that was doing the tour at the Taj Mahal. I mean, fascinating things. You think, oh, well, G2 came from a wealthy family and he was giving all these privileges. You don't know. You don't know where somebody has come from and what they've been through. You you make assumptions and then you think about that in, but it's amazing when you ask questions about the history and the background of where people came. It's like, wow, it opens your eyes and into things.

SPEAKER_02: 44:38

So I mean, we are all in a very AI can never do that piece of correct, right?

SPEAKER_01: 44:43

I think it's um agree.

SPEAKER_02: 44:44

And I think human instinct, there's judgment, there's empathy, there's there's a level of intuition that you have that I I think it's gonna be hard for AI to just replicate. So if there's one thing we should do is like keep that going.

SPEAKER_01: 44:57

100%. And that's where I think the blending of you know partnerships, friendships that you can come in. I think that's where the power and the energy is gonna come is and in this continuous learning loop.

SPEAKER_00: 45:09

Okay, what G2 and Jim remind us is that AI isn't a single technology shift, it's an execution shift. The organizations that win won't simply adopt models, they'll build the infrastructure, trust, and culture required to use them at scale. The lesson is simple. Don't wait for clarity, but build toward it because in this moment, hesitation is the only real risk. This episode of the AI Proven Ground Podcast was co-produced by Nas Baker, Kara Kuhn, and Diane Swank. Our audio and video engineer is John Knoblock. My name is Brian Phelps. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.