As HR leaders become the stewards of their organizations’ AI journeys, they face a mountain of uncertainty. Much of it is out of their control: how AI will continue to evolve, how the tech will shape broader economic conditions. Yet, where HR can find clarity and control is through ongoing measurement, including understanding what employees are thinking and feeling about the organization’s AI integration, as well as the real-time impacts on both workflows and culture.
Those are all central tenets of Cisco’s AI journey, says Chief People Officer Kelly Jones, whose team has been closely studying the people aspects of AI integration at the tech giant over the last 18 months, including through long-term, enterprise-wide surveys and focus groups. The findings have been illustrative: Employees who are actively utilizing AI have higher engagement, more confidence in the company’s future and better retention.
Jones notes the team is looking at the data realistically—careful not to emphasize over-causation—but that the initial findings have uncovered some significant patterns that will continue to shape Cisco’s approach to AI integration. One of the most significant was the role of leadership in driving adoption.
“Employees are twice as likely to use AI if their leaders do and if they talk about it,” Jones says.
It’s a finding that highlights that HR leaders today need to look much further than the technology itself for sustainable transformation, she says. “The successful AI adoption of Cisco is as much about leadership modeling as it is about the tools.”
Here’s how Jones and Cisco are creating AI strategies that are lasting and people-centric.
Jones: For us, it’s been a huge competitive advantage. To be fair, understanding employee sentiment has always been core to how we run our people team at Cisco. We have an employee listening function that is at the early steps of design when we’re trying to decide what we roll out. It’s not new, but I do think that the discipline of doing it matters more now with this transition we’re in. When I think about AI, it’s not necessarily just the technology change, it’s actually this deeply personal one.
Our employees, they range—they’re curious, some are anxious. If you’re not actually measuring how your employees are feeling, you’re kind of flying blind on what I think is probably the most important transformation of my career, if not everybody who runs HR right now.
A lot of people are talking about usage rates and productivity, and that is certainly interesting and we want to understand that, but it’s just a little sliver of the story. If you think about the things that we really need in this human change—because humans are going through a bit of an identity crisis with this, and we’re asking them to come along with us on this journey—trust and confidence and readiness and whether or not people actually feel equipped to use it responsibly are really going to matter.
So, these signals tell us whether or not adoption is real or just compliance theater.
HR Executive: Have you made any meaningful pivots in your strategy in response to what you’re hearing from employees?
Jones: We absolutely have. One of the biggest was probably in how we were thinking about learning. One of the things that came out very clearly in the data is you can’t legislate or require a mandatory class—“Watch this webinar, get this certification”—and get real enthusiasm and usage with AI. It’s individual and it’s personalized. That’s one of the big, big insights we got.
About 90% of our employees basically said they learned through doing. So, we set up a program at Cisco called Leading Edge, where we have three hands-on labs. Once a month, we give people the time and the space to come and join Edge Up Labs.
We have them for leadership, for individuals and for teams. And it really is a lab environment where people are experimenting. They’re not necessarily getting a script that says, “Here are the things you need to know.” It’s interactive, it’s storytelling and it’s giving us real-time sentiment. We watch the chat and the audience sentiment and change what we’re talking about in the session based on how people are responding. If we go down a path and we think this is really important but we’re starting to see people saying, “Oh yes, we all know that, but what about this?” then we’ll recalibrate.
HR Executive: How are you seeing AI use drive performance improvements?
Jones: In the study we did, we learned that employees who are using AI more frequently received higher performance ratings. They’re more likely to be recommended for promotion. People who in the most recent cycle were recommended for promotion used AI 50% more often than those who didn’t.
We also saw that more than 70% of our employees are saying it’s helping them save time and boost productivity. As we’re seeing this, we’re also seeing stronger engagement and retention. There’s this momentum, but it’s actually happening organically because people are seeing the benefit in their day-to-day work. The broader signal is that when AI is applied well, it can improve performance.
One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make with AI is treating it like a software rollout rather than a cultural shift. If you just push a tool to people, you get compliance. If you want innovation, you have to foster experimentation.
HR Executive: What is your take on companies requiring employees to use AI and building that requirement into their performance reviews?
Jones: We’re not currently mandating AI or tying it to performance reviews. What we’re seeing is that adoption is being driven by demonstrated value, not by the policy.
I think organizations should be a little careful about making raw AI usage the metric. I don’t want people across Cisco optimizing for, how often did I use the tool?—instead of, did I improve the outcome? The better question for me is whether someone is using AI responsibly effectively in order to drive better quality, speed, innovation or customer impact.
You have to move away from this old school model of how you train people and instead make it a hands-on, AI-embedded training. When you do that, you’re not just saying, “Here’s how to use this button.” When you add the storytelling and the role-playing and the real-time problem-solving, you’re allowing people to get their hands on it and treat it more as a cultural change than a technology change.
If you want your workforce to embrace AI, you’ve got to stop training them and start enabling them. You’ve got to give them a sandbox to play in; you’ve got to give them permission to experiment and the data to show them that their own productivity is actually benefiting. When you do that, you don’t have to mandate.
HR Executive: What has been an unexpected impact as employees lean into AI learning?
Jones: One of the areas that’s going really well is that we’re seeing communities that are self-forming within business units around roles. Our customer experience team actually led the way in this. What we found was similar job titles across multiple units in customer experience were self-organizing their own AI learning communities around what were some of the best agents they were building, what were some of the best prompts they were using, what were the outcomes they were seeing for their customers? Enabling people to do this on their own is a really important part of it.
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