Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s Chief People, Policy, and Purpose Officer and Executive Vice President, is leading the networking giant through a major AI-driven transformation that prioritizes workforce reskilling and bottom-up innovation. With 27 years at Cisco, Katsoudas has witnessed numerous technological shifts, but she emphasizes that AI’s impact on the workforce requires unprecedented collaboration and speed.
In April 2024, Cisco joined forces with tech giants including Google, Intel, and Microsoft to launch a workforce consortium focused on reskilling and upskilling roles most likely to be influenced by AI. This collaboration represents a significant shift in how competing companies approach workforce development. “The AI-consortium work would have never happened two years ago,” Katsoudas noted, highlighting how rapidly the industry recognizes the need for collective action.
Cisco’s AI strategy operates on three key pillars: helping companies build infrastructure for AI workloads, integrating AI with Cisco’s existing security-focused portfolio, and deploying AI across internal company functions. Katsoudas emphasizes that while initial concerns focused on job elimination, the reality is more nuanced—AI will transform jobs rather than simply eliminate them.
The company has embraced a bottom-up approach to AI adoption, launching a pilot program that exceeded expectations. Initially hoping for 300 participants, Cisco attracted nearly 800 employees who received Green Belt certification in generative AI. These power users generated 282 ideas for applying AI to their daily work, demonstrating significant improvements in efficiency, productivity, and confidence with the technology.
Katsoudas revealed that research from November 2023 showed 98% of CEOs, CIOs, and IT professionals felt tremendous pressure around AI, yet only 14% had a concrete plan. This gap underscores the importance of empowering employees closest to the work to guide AI implementation, while maintaining a responsible AI framework for appropriate data usage.
Looking ahead, Katsoudas advocates for a fundamental shift from role-based to skills-based workforce planning, arguing that this transition is now mandatory for organizational agility. She also sees AI as a tool to reduce hiring bias through capabilities like blind resume screening, which Cisco previously tested successfully, discovering talented candidates without traditional credentials.
Key Quotes
The AI-consortium work would have never happened two years ago. There’s no way we would have come together and shared our views on roles and tasks and skills. But what we recognize now is that some of this is moving so quickly that you have to do the work together.
Francine Katsoudas explains the unprecedented collaboration between competing tech giants like Cisco, Google, Intel, and Microsoft, highlighting how AI’s rapid evolution has forced industry leaders to share insights and coordinate workforce strategies in ways previously unimaginable.
Initially, we talked about it from a ‘jobs are going away, sky is falling’ perspective. What we feel now is AI will change jobs, and there’s a little bit of architecture that we have to create to help our people navigate that.
Katsoudas reframes the AI workforce narrative from job elimination to job transformation, emphasizing the responsibility organizations have to create support structures that help employees adapt to evolving roles rather than simply fearing displacement.
I think the way to ensure that you do this right is to let the people that are closest to the work guide how it is leveraged moving forward. The only caveat is you have to make sure that you have a responsible AI framework so that people know what’s appropriate and how to leverage data.
The Cisco EVP advocates for empowering frontline employees to drive AI implementation while maintaining ethical guardrails, offering a balanced approach that combines grassroots innovation with corporate responsibility and data governance.
One of the hardest things that needs to happen to the C-suite is we need to pivot away from ‘roles’ in jobs to ‘skills.’ Within Cisco, but also more broadly, the skills conversation never took off the way we hoped it would have. And now you’re going to be forced to play here, because it’s going to drive the level of agility that you need as a company.
Katsoudas identifies a critical shift that AI is forcing upon corporate leadership—moving from traditional role-based organizational structures to skills-based frameworks, a transition that has been discussed for years but is now becoming mandatory for competitive survival.
Our Take
Katsoudas’s insights reveal a mature, pragmatic approach to AI workforce transformation that contrasts sharply with both the hype and fear dominating public discourse. The 98% pressure versus 14% planning statistic is particularly telling—it exposes a dangerous gap between awareness and action that could leave many organizations scrambling as AI capabilities accelerate.
What’s most compelling is Cisco’s bottom-up methodology. By training 800 employees and harvesting 282 practical use cases, they’re building an organic AI adoption engine rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach not only generates better ideas but also builds workforce buy-in and reduces resistance to change.
The workforce consortium formation is equally significant, suggesting that AI’s labor market disruption is severe enough to overcome competitive instincts. When rivals collaborate on workforce strategy, it signals recognition that the challenge exceeds any single company’s capacity to solve alone. This could herald a new era of industry cooperation on human capital issues, potentially extending to standardized training, credential recognition, and ethical frameworks that benefit the entire technology ecosystem.
Why This Matters
This interview provides crucial insights into how leading technology companies are navigating the AI transformation at the workforce level, moving beyond theoretical concerns to practical implementation strategies. The formation of the multi-company workforce consortium signals a pivotal moment where competitive barriers are lowered in favor of collective problem-solving around AI’s labor market impacts.
Katsoudas’s emphasis on bottom-up innovation over top-down mandates offers a replicable model for organizations struggling with AI adoption. The dramatic gap between executive pressure (98%) and actual planning (14%) reveals a widespread leadership challenge that extends far beyond Cisco. Her advocacy for skills-based rather than role-based workforce planning addresses a fundamental restructuring that AI necessitates across all industries.
The success of Cisco’s pilot program—attracting nearly triple the expected participants and generating hundreds of practical use cases—demonstrates that employee enthusiasm for AI exists when proper training and frameworks are provided. This bottom-up approach could accelerate AI adoption while reducing workforce anxiety. Additionally, the potential for AI to reduce hiring bias and expand talent pools beyond traditional credentials could have profound implications for workforce diversity and social mobility in the technology sector.
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