YouSaid · the spoken record

Chuck Robbins

lines on the record: 80
first: 2026-04-06
most recent: 2026-04-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Look, it's hard to predict what's going to happen. I mean, we were, as I said earlier, we had a high degree of luck with the optics investments and the silicon investments that we made. We had some smart people who were suggesting that we make them, but they've turned out to be magical for us right now. I think for the next three to five years, we're going to be spending every ounce of our energy on secure connectivity in this agentic era. But I mean, three years from now, I don't know what we'll need to do because things are changing so quickly. I think we're as prepared as we can be.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our role is really around the power consumption of the platforms that we sell them. And that's a massive part of our innovation cycle every time we want to deliver higher performance, lower power consumption. And so that's the role that we play in that space.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think one of the other, you know, in my hometown overseen And that never came to pass. And now it's going to be a Microsoft data center instead of 13,000 or 15,000 jobs, which is whatever Foxconn promised to that site. There's going to be like a couple thousand. So this is a lot of water, a lot of power, and then not the economic lift that you get. And then maybe the inflationary pressures on power or other utilities. As your customers are building out, are you working with them to reduce those pressures, to find ways to make the data centers more efficient?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think they're political problems. I think they're issues of utility and power and cooling and water and all those things. I mean, they're all interconnected. But I don't wake up every day and deal with this issue. But the people who do are very smart people. I think the thing that a consumer is going to be okay with is if you go in somewhere and you not only build a data center, but somehow you increase the utility capacity of that community or you do something positive in that community beyond streaming Netflix faster. I think that's when they'll be okay with it. I don't think their concerns are around Being unsightly or anything like that, I think the issue is the concern over the inflationary pressure that it puts on utilities and the things that they need”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is Tom Cruise going to be there? Something there would be, you would have some emotional connection to the thing that's happening. You don't have that right now. The pressure on not building these data centers is only going to go up, right? In weird ways. I think in Alabama, there's a state center that proposed blocking solar buildouts is a way to reduce data center interest in his state. That's a weird outcome. What happens if we can't build more data centers? What happens if the public just doesn't buy in”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm saying the growth of the business, the explosive growth that everyone's seeing is in AI, right? It's in building these new generation data centers, this new generation of compute. The problem, and I just keep circling around to it, is the people don't want those data centers near them. And I have yet to see the argument. For why that should happen. In my mind, the argument is great consumer products, right? Like that's, if you're like, that's where Netflix comes from. I think people will calm down. But that's not the argument we're making right now. There isn't a product like Netflix.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Networks. You could see this become something there's discussions now of inference in grids and dynamic routing of these inferencing requests based on everything from cost to power at a given time of day to capacity that's available. I mean, there's a lot of thinking about how this plays out. And I think it's still TBD, but it's coming.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's still early at the edge. I think everybody believes they're going to need it, and we're seeing certain applications where you're starting to see people pilot it. And I think this may be a good opportunity for the telecom providers. There's always been this thesis that Edge Compute was going to be a big benefit for them.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. This is what I was mentioning. The dynamic between the edge and the data center seems to always be changing. I saw some press releases out of NVIDIA's GTC about more compute coming to the edge of certain big network providers. Are you seeing that play out where we don't know where it's supposed to be so where everyone's investing The edge and the”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, we would like to participate and we'd like to see that continue to grow, obviously, because it's good for our business. But the inferencing side, and some people believe that that's going to be bigger. A lot of enterprise customers are going to want to do the inferencing at a point of interaction with a customer and have an immediate value that they're garnering in that interaction with that customer. And that's going to be very distributed. And so distributed compute requires high performance networks, which is good for us. So we like that.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it actually is great. I don't think you're going to be done with training, by the way. I think it's going to be additive. I think the inferencing stuff is going to be additive.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to build AGI. They don't want to say it, but they're saying it all the time. There's a chance that the models are good enough and it's actually just inference now. We're just going to run agents and cloud code is big enough to actually meaningfully affect enterprise cost dynamics. Is that change your business if we're done with training and actually inference is the point?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other way I can see things, maybe not get shaky, but change dramatically in the way that changes the sort of investment valence of the AI industry is if inference becomes more valuable than training, right? So far, all the emphasis has been we got to run these GPUs red hot to do training because the next version of the model will finally be capable enough to be your girlfriend. Like whatever it is that they think they're going to do, like something about training has been the point”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we're in some of them. Some of them want to use us. A lot of them want partnerships with us, honestly, because they want the enterprise access and they don't have a robust enterprise sales force and they think that we can help them there. And so in many cases, we work together to figure that out.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, but not particularly for us. We're super conservative. And so I don't think I've heard instances where we've looked at some of the financials and have chosen not to do business with some of these folks. And I think every company's got to make their own decisions. We also have creative financing solutions that protect us that we can work through, but we're not, you know, we learned a lot in 2000.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amount of capital tied up in what you might call circular financing with some of these neoclouds, that seems dangerous to me. It seems like if I had to point at where things will get shaky first, it will be well. We did a lot of Ford investment, a lot of debt investment into NeoClouds against workloads that themselves have not yet paid off. Eventually, all the way, you know, the bill comes due, right? Or the investments don't happen. Is that a risk that's on your mind?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There'll be lost misplaced capital. There'll be companies that'll shut their doors. And then there'll be, the winners will emerge and we'll build out at scale just like we saw the first wave. I would suspect that's what will happen. I think there's certainly going to be companies that are going to cease to exist. They're going to go away. That's what happens on any of these early things. You take a risk. That's why the reward's so high. It's risk reward. And so it's just the nature of these massive transitions. And this is bigger than probably It's bigger and faster than anything we've ever seen.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like for most of this conversation, my assumption has been this is going to keep going. This is going to keep working and the problems will be complicated and everyone will work diligently and we'll solve them and someone will invent the consumer. All of this will pay off. What if it doesn't? What if this bubble pops? What does that look like for you?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think you have to think about security at an agent level like you do at an employee level, but on steroids. It's going to be five to ten X more security that you'll need to apply, maybe more. I'm just throwing numbers out. But I think we have to figure that out as we get going. But it's certainly going to introduce an entry point for bad actors to do things that you certainly wouldn't want them to be able to do. We're learning and everybody's working on this problem simultaneously right now.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are having those conversations around primarily not wanting to have a third party or another country disintermediate their capabilities through tech by having some control lever or kill switch or something of that nature? That's typically what they're talking about.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That creates short term dynamics for your citizens. But I don't think on a normal day to day basis it's going to be that meaningfully different.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's going to be more fragmented for sure. I think you are going to see lots of district. You're seeing the cloud providers build in regions in certain places and they're having to re-architect to think about this. For most of the functionality that we use the internet for today, I'm not sure it's going to change much, to be honest. There are going to be controls that are going to exist, but I don't think it's going to change the core normal operating functionality of how it works today. They'll be there in the case of an issue or an emergency. Now, where you store data and all those kinds of things, that's not the network's issue. So how that plays out is independent of what we would think about. But I think you get it in times of crisis, and that's when you might see things happen differently. If you're a certain country and you get into a conflict and you want to isolate yourself from a communications perspective so that you can trust that your communications clear, then maybe.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, you'd love if you have a cloud solution. Historically, what you would do in a lot of companies were built this way. You build global instances and you partition it and you sell it off to different customers. If you go to Germany, as an example in Germany, he says, I want to have my version of that running in my country. It's architecturally different than how you might have designed it to begin with. We're now designing a lot of those control systems or those cloud-oriented systems so that they can be structured in a way where they can run in a country alone. And we don't think about building global instances anymore.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And trust becomes such a big. It's a big discussion, obviously, around AI. But it is really a big deal. And so for us as an example, every country we operate in, we have always tried to be good citizens, good members of the community. We've had education programs where we've been training on digital skills around the world for 25 years, 30 years. Last year alone, we trained over, we had 5 million learners go through one of these programs around the world. And so that trust element is going to become very important. The technology is one thing. You have to build technology that can be deployed the way they want it to be deployed, and then you have to have a very high degree of trust.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you're seeing play out is not only do Countries, and it's not limited to Europe at this point. Not only do they want to have data sovereignty, they want to have sovereign control over any technology they're using. They don't want the U.S. to have the ability to impede the use of that product under any conditions. As an example, some of the meeting platforms like WebEx or Zoom, et cetera, those things, they don't want any other country, and I'll say the US, but any other country to have the ability to cut off their access to use these platforms if they were going to invest and use them for critical reasons in other countries. In many cases, they would prefer to have, let's use Europe as an example, European companies that build a technology that they use in their infrastructure. In many cases, they don't have that capacity at scale. And so then they have to go default to who are the companies that I trust.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI is different, although we did talk about it for a long time, and then all of a sudden it broke loose, but the pace at which it's changing is just unprecedented. So I think we'll have to see on 6G. It's still T. You'll see the same mistakes made from a speed of investment perspective until they become more clear.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've seen some unique 5G use cases. Manufacturing has been a great one, but they're very niche, right? The most prevalent 5G use case is actually backup connectivity for branches, as an example. But you're right. We didn't have the number of use cases. And I think if you ask the CEOs of the telecoms, they would probably say that they're disappointed in the return they got on all the investment around 5G. I think robotics in general could be the real driver of the utilization of 6G once it gets built. But again, it's early days of being defined. It's still, typically we've talked about these sort of tech transitions for years and years and years before they come to fruition.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go ahead and draw my energy costs through the roof, and I'll be okay. You know, we saw a little bit of this with 5G. They didn't want radio towers. You remember that whole thing?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there is. Look, we've been the most innovative country on the planet for a very long time, and that's not going to change. And some of the smartest people in the world are actually trying to solve these problems, and they will. By the way, I think if you give some of those residents. The greatest AI tools on their phone that they've ever seen in their lives. They still don't want the data center in their backyard. Really? I don't think they're going to say, oh, this is great. So I'll.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People like it There's not an AI product for consumers that they like so much that just transcends the objections they can reach for. We're seeing it play out in really weird ways. In bipartisan ways, people are pushing back against the data centers. Are you going to be able to hit your goals of data center construction slows? Is there a way to overcome those goals without the great consumer product?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think this relates to why I started out by asking about data centers in space. And I've heard Sundar Pachai say variations of this idea. Without the big consumer application that everybody understands and sees the benefit, putting the data center in the backyard is becoming an increasingly harder sell. Right, the power requirements, the water requirements, which I know are controversial and often argue about, but just the energy resources requirements of the data centers are Making the data centers unpopular. I don't think it's all that. I don't think the environmental argument historically wins in America. Like I drive a V8 Mustang. I'm going to keep driving that car. We have an EV that's parked right next to it, but those cars are popular for reasons, right? Fast fashion, enormous environmental impact.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years. I don't have any great examples yet. And you're right. You are seeing sort of some horizontal areas in the enterprise that are consistent across almost every company, like coding. Customer service is one that everybody's working. You're starting to see some emerging... Horizontal use cases in legal, and we see a lot of use cases in our people organization too. And I think those are pre-standard. Everybody's at least aware of those opportunities. People are at different stages on the journey. But yeah, I'm not the consumer expert by any stretch. We're pure B2B, so that's where I spend all my time.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depends on the customer. If you look at telcos, the cloud providers, the people whose core business is highly dependent upon products that we buy, I mean, everybody's is, but I mean, we will have those conversations with their CEOs and their leadership team. You go to Mobile World Congress as an example. We were just there. Every meeting the CEO's in from those carriers and service providers. So they care. When you get into the enterprise space, Some of them are super technical. They understand the value of technology. So they want to talk about trends. They want to talk about what do we see other companies doing or what are we doing as an enterprise that they should be thinking about. But usually, if there's a big something big going on the table, my only positioning with them is if you go with us, you have my personal commitment that we'll throw all the resources we need to to make a new successful. And that's usually all they want to know.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is what's driving a lot of the investments because there's a big FOMO issue in the C-suite today. CEOs are like, what am I missing? What's my competitor going to do that I don't know about? And so I think what that leads us to is, you know, we used to say get 80% of the information you can and then make the decision, then adjust as you go. And I think that's maybe it's not 80 anymore, but you're going to have to take that approach and you're going to have to be willing to take risks and you've got to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And if you're not, it's going to be pretty complicated and pretty stressful time.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just have to move faster. We had an all hands with our entire company yesterday. We do it once a month. I told them, I said, look, if speed and change, if the makes you uncomfortable, you're going to be uncomfortable. It is a world where companies can get seriously damaged in a very short period of time”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You haven't even gotten to three or four other big ones. What are they? Well, you've got the geopolitical situation, you've got sovereignty requirements all around the world emerging. You've got two wars around the world. You've got tariffs. You've got memory costs. You got all these things. We're all trying to navigate. So it's pretty complicated.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The decisions question you are dealing with a vast amount of uncertainty, right? How the global internet will be structured is a vast amount of uncertainty. What the hyperscalers need is they build out new capacity for uncertain workloads. Who knows? We're going to sell a bunch of... In GDP growth, I would say is the biggest uncertainty of all. How are you dealing with that?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or you got two smart people who completely disagree, which tells you it's complicated. In general, we just spend a lot of time in transparent discussion and open communication about how we're going to make the decisions. At the end of the day, I own them. And I have this belief that when a decision goes really well, you give everybody else the credit. And when it goes very poorly, it's all on me. And that's how you just have to operate.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I actually Wrote my thesis when I was going through the process of becoming CEO, and the board was assessing the candidates. One of the things I called out in the document was that, and this is 12 years ago, okay, 11 and a half years ago, I said that the industry is moving so rapidly, you're going to have to have team-based strategy. You have to have a lot of people developing strategy because there's no one individual in general. There's some brilliant minds, so I'm not ruling any human out, but that can actually come up with the exact right strategy every time they're assessing what they need to do. So we spent a lot of time together as a team. We spend anywhere from one to three hours together every Monday. We are off-site together for two to three days every quarter. And the way we make decisions, look, 99% of the decisions get made below me because they're easy or two smart people agree. And when they get to me or any other CEO, they're typically, you're usually assessing two potential bad choices.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of laying down our weapons, and we still compete, but in service to our customers, I believe we have to share intelligence real time much more effectively today to help our customers deal with this because any one of us on our own is going to be less effective than all of us together. And so that's a big thing we've been pushing. We've been building a lot of capabilities. And there's a lot of opportunities to integrate our platforms and our threat intelligence. And if you think about what you can do with models, if you start training on threat intelligence and conditions that led up to threat vulnerabilities, there's an awful lot we can do to get ahead of this, and we need to do that.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The emulations that you're going to see and the simulations of an email and video and people replicating me and sending it to some, I mean, it's just going to get crazier. And so we have to be better at using our tools. And I have also been a big proponent of all of the security competitors in the industry.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say, hey, you're running these four versions of our software. We've seen a lot of instances where when you're running those four, it's created a problem or there's a cybersecurity risks in certain parts of the code that AI can help us find. I mean, there's a lot of upside. So there's a lot of opportunity for AI to help us become more reliable, safer.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're right, our stuff, the whole mental model around our software development versus these models. Kevin Wilfrom OpenAI, he made a comment at our AI summit one and he said, you guys should be using these models when they're working properly 10% of the time just to get to use them. And I sat there and I listened to that comment. And it's just a different way of thinking. I mean, granted, they're going to get it to full, but you just go into it recognizing that it's still evolving. We don't have that luxury. Our stuff has to work. So we'll have to figure this out as we go. But we've seen how dependent the world is on technology functioning properly. And so we will have to just assess it as we get closer, but I think there's going to be an awful lot of testing that has to get done. But the flip side is we think AI can help us find bugs more quickly. It can help us assess customers' infrastructure.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stay on that for one second, right? Cisco code can't fail if Cisco fails something bad happens and escalating catastrophic way. How do you think about that risk? I keep joking that I ask everybody the org chart question. I've asked it for five years and there's like two answers. Like we're functional or divisional and we get through it. And now I think we're on the cusp of seeing some of the weirdest org charts in business history. I manage a team of two people and 500 agents. Meta is about to do one manager to 50 individual contributors all using Strike Code. I don't know how any of that's going to work. You can't take some of those risks, but you're describing the productivity gains that might come with some of those risks. How are you thinking about that?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my head of product told me we took all these old lines of code, we compressed it to about 20% of what it was before, converted it to a modern language using AI. And my first response to him was, you better test that like crazy before you put it in a product and put it in a customer environment. So there's a lot of stuff we're still learning as we go through there.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies are going to have to decide am I going to maintain the same pace of innovation with half the people, or am I going to double my pace of innovation with the same number of people? And I think different companies are going to make different decisions in some variant in between. And I think that's where we're going to head. But we got to see this all come to life. I mean, we're seeing the early successes of coding, but we haven't seen the unintended downside yet that we haven't figured out. We got 20-year-old code, 30-year-old code that's integrated in systems that's written in C++ as an example.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sam and I were talking about this last week. And let's say that our engineers become twice as productive because of coding as an example. This year we'll have five or six products that'll be 100% written by AI. Next year we'll probably have 70% of our code that'll be written by AI. You still have to test it. You still got to go through all that stuff. But let's say you make them twice as productive just for simplicity of math here.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of the time, those are rapid reallocations that we need to do. It's unfortunate, but typically the ones we've done have not been about reducing the total number of headcount, at least up till now. They have not generally been that way.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're 85,000 people plus some contractors, and we're structured functionally like most companies. We've got a sales organization. We've got a product organization. The one change that I made about 18 months ago is that I consolidated all of our products under a single leader for the first time that I can remember. It's a big complex portfolio. And so we did that. We've got a services organization. It's fairly functional, pretty standard.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody's in the same boat. It's not like you're going to go somewhere else and somebody's going to give you memory at 10% of the cost of what we're giving it to you for. I mean, everybody's just trying to deal with a capacity crunch right now.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT