How Cisco Systems’ CIO is rethinking work in an AI-powered world for the corporate’s 10,000 IT staff

He favors a collaborative approach that takes into consideration input from both the C-suite and workers.

“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.” 

What that means for his work as CIO is finding ways to improve worker productivity, including giving developers more access to AI coding tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot. Cisco Systems is closely monitoring adoption of these tools, as well as the amount of code that’s accepted by developers. 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% and while that may not sound too impressive, Previn says it is a big leap from 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.

There’s also the ongoing work that Previn is doing to rethink the IT function’s work and responsibilities. He 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.

Cisco Systems has also made some investments in AI applications that improve productivity to support the non-technical workforce. Some examples include using AI to do more intelligent onboarding, which allows for Cisco to more accurately assess exactly what tools or software are needed to support the role a new employee is hired for.

Cisco Systems is also using AI for planning hardware updates. Most companies refresh their laptops every two-to-four years. But by using AI to detect a laptop’s memory, application performance, and network telemetry, Cisco Systems can decipher the difference between performance problems that can be fixed by the IT team versus when a device may fail and will need to be replaced.

Upgrading laptops is a “significant amount of money at a company of our size,” says Previn. “And sometimes a lot of people are perfectly happy with the laptop they have.”

While Cisco Systems generates nearly $57 billion in annual revenue, large enough to rank 83rd on the Fortune 500, the company competes aggressively for tech talent in an arms race that has accelerated this year as the generative AI boom continues to expand.

To lure skilled workers, Previn says he prioritizes creating a workplace that encourages “emotional safety for people to be able to innovate and experiment and fail fast.”

Another key pillar of Previn’s strategy involves recognizing IT’s operation to do all work by a singular platform. There are separate teams organized cross functionally—one to support Workday, another for SAP, and yet another for Oracle—that are made up of around six-to-ten employees who have all the necessary skills to advance an internal tech project into production. This allows small teams to operate independently. 

“There’s a huge productivity loss when you’re kind of dynamically forming and un-forming teams by project,” asserts Previn.

Previn says Cisco Systems fields a lot of pitches from the software-as-a-service providers it works with to add on more expensive AI capabilities. He progresses cautiously on that front. “You can consume all of those things, but run the risk of controlled cost,” says Previn. “It can create employee experience confusion, similar to what we had when chatbots started to become a thing.” 

He expects that generative AI will increasingly evolve to become an agent-to-agent world, a digital workforce that can perform tasks on behalf of workers, sometimes autonomously and in coordination with each other. That involves an inverted approach to how employees engage with technology. Rather than an employee asking an AI search tool, “Where’s the link to Workday?” they could instead say, “I’m taking a vacation on Friday.” Agentic AI could then do the rest: block off calendars, cancel meetings, and put up an out-of-office message. 

Cisco Systems has developed the company’s own internal digital AI teammate that helps the company’s employees find and understand general information more quickly. Rather than an employee being asked to toggle between different language models or select if the data they want to access is publicly available or is internal information, the AI assistant infers intent and determines the appropriate selections.

Previn says this approach is an evolution of his thinking that Cisco Systems can’t assume that workers are up to date on which AI models are most advanced and best match the tasks they are trying to complete.

“The rate of innovation in AI is happening so quickly that if you find out your developers are using a language model that is six months old, then effectively, all the software you’re writing is already six months out of date,” says Previn.

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Meta freezes hiring for its AI division. After luring more than 50 AI researchers and engineers, the social media giant behind Facebook and Instagram has put into place a hiring freeze for AI talent, according to a report last week from The Wall Street Journal, a move that a company spokesperson confirmed was due to organizational planning to create “a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.” An AI arms race has accelerated in 2025 for both technology and non-technology roles, with Meta among the Big Tech giants that have been seen as especially aggressive on that front, offering researchers pay packages worth nine figures. Last week, Meta also announced internally it would split its AI division into four groups, focused on research, “superintelligence” AI, products, and infrastructure like hardware and data centers. 

U.S. takes 10% stake in struggling chipmaker Intel. Intel has agreed to give the U.S. government a 10% stake, worth roughly $10 billion, though the federal government will not be involved in company governance nor claim a board seat. The news comes after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had outlined plans for the government to receive equity in return for the CHIPS Act cash grants that Intel has received, which President Donald Trump has lamented as handing out money to chip makers like Intel without getting anything in return. “We should get an equity stake for our money, so we’ll deliver the money which was already committed under the Biden administration,” Lutnick told CNBC last week.

Anthropic nears deal to raise $10 billion in new round of funding. Anthropic, which was last valued at $61.5 billion in a $3.5 billion round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in March, is reportedly seeing strong investor demand in what would be one of the largest rounds of funding to date for an AI startup. Bloomberg says that investment firm Iconiq Capital is reportedly leading the round and that other expected participants include TPG, Lightspeed, Spark Capital, and Menlo Ventures. Less than three years after the debut of ChatGPT, AI is producing billion-dollar startups like Anthropic faster than the dot-com era, with 498 AI unicorns valued at $1 billion or more with a combined value of $2.7 trillion, according to CB Insights.

General Motors builds AI team with Big Tech alums. WSJ reports on an AI hiring spree spearheaded by GM, the auto giant that has lured nearly a dozen technologists from top tech companies including Meta and Amazon Web Services over the last eight months. Two of the more notable hires thus far, WSJ says, are Barak Turovsky, who now serves as GM’s first-ever chief AI officer, and John Anderson, now executive director of AI research. Both came from Google. The team’s work will support GM’s planned AI center of excellence that will mostly be based in California. GM’s AI team is fairly scrappy, with less than 20 workers, and some applications of AI that they are focusing on include improving back-office workflows and boosting products like manufacturing robots and the future fleet of autonomous vehicles.

ADOPTION CURVE

Generative AI giving an innovation lift to other tech advancements. McKinsey has identified 13 technology trends that the consulting giant says has the potential to transform business and reported that equity investments have increased in 10 of these breakthroughs, with big double-digit gains for AI, cloud and edge computing, and digital trust and cybersecurity. Agentic AI, an application of generative AI that can perform more complex tasks and at times act autonomously, experienced a particular meteoric rise, with $1.1 billion in equity investments last year and a 985% increase in job postings from 2023.

Lareina Yee, a co-author of the report and McKinsey’s global institute director and senior partner, tells Fortune that generative AI is raising the bar for what’s possible across other technology trends. “Robotics has been around for 40 to 50 years and we’ve been implementing them in manufacturing, but now powered by cognitive intelligence, that’s a game changer,” says Yee.

CIOs and other technologists aren’t expected to keep a close eye on every advancement, Yee says, as some are more niche applications like bioengineering or space technologies. But the rapid advancements of generative AI highlight that other technologies, like quantum computing, could soon make the leap from science to reality. “It’s all science until it’s not,” says Yee.

Courtesy of McKinsey & Company

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– Synergy Pet Group is seeking a CTO, based in Lakewood, New Jersey. Posted salary range: $200K-$250K/year.

– Chartmetric is seeking a CTO, based in San Mateo, California. Posted salary range: $200K-$300K/year.

– Headway is seeking a director of IT, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $218.4K-$257K/year.

– Whatnot is seeking a director of IT, based in Los Angeles. Posted salary range: $230K-$270K/year.

Hired:

– American International Group (No. 157 on the Fortune 500) appointed Scott Hallworth as chief digital officer, effective September 1, where he will oversee AIG’s digital, data, and generative AI strategy. Hallworth joins the insurance giant after most recently serving as chief data and analytics officer at computer maker Hewlett Packard. He also previously held technology leadership roles at Fannie Mae and Capital One.

Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 companies C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.

– UKG announced the appointment of Jim Joudrey as CTO, joining the workforce management and human resources software provider to oversee the 4,000 global engineering and cloud teams. Joudrey will serve on the UKG executive leadership team and report to CEO Jennifer Morgan. He most recently served as a VP at Amazon and spent a decade at the tech giant, including leadership roles spanning financial systems, supply chain, and in Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

– The Postal Service has elevated Gary Reblin to the role of CTO, after he previously held the position on an acting basis since June. Reblin succeeds Scott Bombaugh, who retired after a 38-year career at the government agency. Reblin initially joined USPS in 1991, previously serving as applied engineering VP and holding executive roles in several areas, including shipping services and product innovation.

– Realtor.com announced the appointment of Janakiraman Karthikeyan as CTO, joining the real estate listings website after most recently serving as VP of technology at online pet food retailer Chewy.

– Jackson Walker named Bill Finner at CIO, expanding his oversight of the Texas-based law firm’s information systems and technology infrastructure. Finner joined Jackson Walker in 2009 and most recently served as director of networking and technical infrastructure.

– Voyager Technologies appointed Paul Tilghman as CTO, joining the space and defense technology company after most recently serving as a chief engineer at defense tech provider Anduril Industries. Earlier in this career, he worked for Microsoft’s Azure space connectivity organization and also held leadership roles at Lockheed Martin’s advanced technology laboratories.

– Aruze Gaming Global announced the appointment of Srini Adiraju as CTO, joining the slot machines manufacturer after most recently serving as VP of engineering at automotive electronics supplier Visteon. He also spent 14 years at WMS Gaming and Scientific Games, where he designed and launched features for slot machines.

– SubjectWell appointed Steve Ciske as CTO, where he will oversee the company’s AI strategy and also ensure security and compliance practices. Ciske joins the clinical trials patient recruitment provider after most recently serving as VP of global technology services for cruise operator Carnival, CTO at women’s handbag and accessories purveyor Thirty-One Gifts, and CTO at eyewear provider EssilorLuxottica.