It is a pleasure to welcome you all to the CNBC TV18 Gateway to India Leadership Corridor. We are meeting here in the midst of global uncertainty, still in the midst of two wars that are currently underway, and of course a weaponization of tariffs. But in all of that, the India story continues to be resilient. The macros are holding 7.8% growth at this point in time, and the expectation is that we will continue to see foreign direct investment coming in, and of course continue to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
Without further ado, let me give you a little brief on my guest here this afternoon. He is of course a regular on CNBC TV18. For that, thank you very much, Chuck Robbins. It's always a pleasure to have you join us here when you're in India. But more importantly, Cisco has been a long-term believer in the India story. In fact, Cisco perhaps was the first company to really start what we now have come to call as the global capability centers. They were really the pioneers of that here in India, and of course now are also manufacturing here in India.
So Chuck, before I talk to you about what's happening in the world, let's talk a little bit about what's happening here in India as far as Cisco is concerned. As I pointed out, you entered India in 1995. You had a ringside seat as to what has changed in India. You continue to believe in the India story. If India is the place to be, as you've very often said, what excites you today about it?
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's good to be here with all of you. And look, I think you've got — you mentioned it — 30 plus years here. We started out like everybody. It was a great opportunity for us to move great talent here. Over time, just continue to expand our talent from operations work, engineering, and now we see it as a big opportunity for silicon design capabilities in our engineering team that actually designs our silicon. We've worked deeply on education here. In the last 12 months, we educated over a million students in India on digital skills of different sorts to prepare them, better prepare them for the future. And as you said, we launched manufacturing a couple years ago, which has been very successful.
I think the reason we're so excited, first of all, the growth is incredible, and for all intents and purposes, it seems like it's going to continue. I think the investments that have been made here — I mean, the digitization of the country, the mobile broadband all over the country to virtually every human, which when we started working on that together, I think 14 years ago, 15 years ago, and here we are, it seems like it was yesterday.
And then I think the understanding by the leaders in the country of the importance of this technology and the importance of the partnerships they have with companies they trust is something that I'm also very excited about. The access we have to those leaders, the openness to discuss topics, issues, things that we think we could do in order to help continue the growth. There's just a lot going on. It's all good.
There is a lot going on, and it's good to hear that it's all good, Chuck, as you point out. But you know, when we last spoke, you said that while you continue to double down on your investments and your plans in India, perhaps the one thing that you wanted more clarity on was the US-India relationship and the trade deal. And the trade certainty on that front continues to be elusive, at least for now. Does that continue to be one of the deterrents as you look at your opportunities here in India?
The good news is 7.8%, 8% growth without the deal. So I think we're okay. You know, I don't give that much thought right now. I think the opportunity exists independent of that. And my belief is that'll get worked out in some time frame. But the truth is that India is moving forward. The growth is here. The commitment to the technology is here. And we've found, you know, our entry into manufacturing and using it as an export hub, as an example, has been very successful. So the things we've been doing here are working, and so when that happens, it'll only make things better. But I don't think we need it to be successful. We want it. We need it as two countries, but for Cisco's success in India and for India to continue growing, it's obvious that we can make a lot of progress without it.
You know, let's double down on manufacturing here in India and exporting from India for the world, which is something that you, as you point out, have been doing successfully for the last few years. You know, you started with one product line. It's up to about six at this point in time, after the two false starts on the manufacturing.
You always have to remind me of the false starts.
But what I'm trying to understand is what has worked since then to get you to the point where you are today, and what more would you like to see happen for you to actually be able to do full-scale manufacturing here, not just assembly?
Yeah. So Shireen references a couple times we made attempts to manufacture here, and we came in with single products just for the India market, and you get to a point where you can't get the economies of scale fast enough to warrant the investment. And so in this case, we made two decisions that were different. Number one, our plan was to expand well beyond one product. And then also the second was to actually use it as an export hub. And so more than half of the products we're building are actually being exported — actually a huge percentage of them. So that's working really well. We're up to, I think, six products that we're doing now.
And just to put it in perspective, the first product that we manufactured here has 30,000 components inside the product. So the other big thing that we agreed with the government on that we wanted to work on was bringing that component ecosystem. It's similar to what happened, I believe, with Apple when they came here, except we have more products and there's a lot to be done. So we've made a little progress, not as much as I'd like, and we continue to work together to try to bring some of that ecosystem into India so that it reduces transit costs, it makes it more seamless, and it's good for the economy here as well. So that's an area that I think we need to continue to work on.
You know, let's talk about AI, Chuck, because I think there are many startups in this room. They would like to understand what's happening in the AI world. Lots of CEOs would like to get your perspective on that as well. You do an AI readiness index, and as far as the pace setters club is concerned, India's about 17%. What does that mean exactly? And as you look at what is happening with the networking supercycle, as you call it today, you know, are there any signs of things slowing down at this point in time? And what will it take to actually get that 13% global number and the 17% India number to look very different in the next few years?
Yes. So it's effectively just a gauge of how far along in this journey are we as a global society and as countries. And I'd also probably suggest that it's probably inexact, but relatively speaking, I would say it's accurate. And it just simply talks about where we are. We're so early in this lifecycle. And when you look at even companies in other countries, take the United States as an example. If you go back 18 months, my customers in the US would tell me, 'I'm not sure what we're going to be doing with AI, but I know I need to have the most modern technology infrastructure in place that I can possibly have to do so.' Now, we know more about what's going to happen. We know more about the use cases. We know more about the implications of agentic applications and agents.
And I think a lot has to happen. We have to continue to educate the workforce, continue to create more talent in this space by educating them. We have to really work on safety. We have to work on guardrails. We have to work on the public perception of what the reality of this technology is going to be. We need to spend more time talking about the positive use cases of AI instead of focusing on the fact that it's going to kill us. That was supposed to be a joke, but anyway.
Well, I mean, the CEOs who are actually running these companies don't believe it's a joke. They're pointing it out as a key threat at this point in time.
Well, I think look, what I believe is that there's a big question about whether we should slow down the pace of the AI development. And the reality is that you're not going to. It's not going to happen. So what we need to focus on is speeding up and making sure that our work on cyber defenses, our work on guardrails, our work on whatever the policy needs to look like — and that's very much in progress in my opinion — but that has to move at or faster than the AI models are developing. And so that's our job, and we need to focus on the cyber defenses in light of what these new models enable. And we got to put a lot of engineering talent behind making that happen.
So you don't believe that we're likely to see any slowing down, even though there are calls from across industry, and it's very hard to get this industry to speak in one voice, but it is on this issue. So you don't really see superintelligence slowing down?
I really don't. I think ideologically there's a lot of people who would like to see it slow down. And I'm not making a statement on whether I agree or disagree with them. I'm just making a pragmatic assessment that I don't think it's going to slow down. You would have to have everyone in the world agree that we're all going to slow down. And I just don't think that's going to happen. And so I think in light of that, we need to focus on guardrails. We need to focus on knowledge. We really need to understand these things more. We need to understand what the implications are. What are we dealing with when these new models come out so that we can actually apply whatever safeguards that we need to apply in order to make sure that we can get the benefit of these while minimizing the risk.
You know, from a Cisco point of view, your stock is up 55% this year. You've had a blowout year. FY26 has been a record year as far as Cisco is concerned. Do you believe this pace of growth is likely to be something that you can continue and scale on? I mean, these are staggering numbers, almost $64 billion in revenue. Do you believe that this is the pace that you can continue to grow at?
We don't see any — when you look at the capex commitments from the major hyperscalers in the United States, and it's in excess of a trillion dollars in calendar '27. So I mean, if you look at our share of that, if we're just talking about Cisco, it's still relatively small. So we have a lot of upside. The bigger question I think everyone asks is, is this broader spending wave sustainable?
And I think that look, if you just go back to 1998, '99, 2000, and then we had the dot-com bubble burst. Look at the industries that were created as a result of that. If you go back to 2000, everybody says, okay, is this thing going to — is the bubble going to burst? It's like, well, did the bubble burst then? And the answer was yes. I'm not even saying we have a bubble now, but the bubble burst then. And then look at the companies that emerged out of that bubble. Look at the iPhone in 2007. No one expected the iPhone. Look at the application ecosystem and everything that actually got built around the iPhone in 2007. So we're just starting, but it's moving faster. So that's what's really important.
And the other thing that's important is that if you look at the companies who are putting the biggest investments into this technology, this space is existential to them, and they are some of the smartest people in the world, some of the largest companies in the world, and I don't think they have any intention of slowing down.
