Cisco will make around five percent of staff redundant and has generously offered them free Cisco training for a year once they’re gone.
CEO Chuck Robbins broke the news in a Wednesday blog post titled “Our Path Forward” that opens “Today we announced our Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12 percent year over year, and double-digit top and bottom-line growth. The ELT [executive leadership team] and I could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.” That growth included net income growing 35 percent to $3.4 billion.
Yet Robbins’ pride was not sufficient for all Cisco staff to keep their jobs.
The CEO said the layoffs are necessary because “The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest.”
Long term value creation almost always involves investing in people. It might involve increasing their productivity with well architected and deployed AI tools, but if you just replace people with AI, you save money in the short term by externalizing costs in a similar manner to offshoring.
At average each of the 4,000 people was creating close to $200,000 revenue.
What a nice way to say thank you.
Leeches…
