'Emotional safety' | Cisco CIO ramps up worker AI onboarding to transform productivity

Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn, says advancements in AI are leading him to rethink workflows not just for Cisco Systems’ 10,000 IT workers,  but also the broader employee base of around 90,400.

“There’s the bottom up inertia of people asking for access to tools, and then there’s the top-down inertia of saying, ‘Here’s how we see this role evolving,’” says Previn, who has served as chief information officer at the networking-equipment company since 2021. “You sort of have both trying to meet in the middle.”

Around 70% of the company’s 20,000 developers log into AI coding tools at least once per month. The acceptance rate for AI-generated code is around 24% compared with 4% nearly a year ago. “AI is getting better,” he adds. “It’s supporting more programming languages. Developers are getting more comfortable with it.” Over time, he hopes that as much as 70% of Cisco Systems’ code will be AI generated.

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Rethinking IT and non-technical roles

Previn is reevaluating the primary work done for each role, as well as job titles, the ways to reevaluate work with AI tools, and what future training may be required to support such big, sweeping changes.