I sort of want to digest and reflect on all that's happened here so far. Starting off with, I think Cisco CNBC. So I watched the markets closed up about 3% today. All time highs. Software didn't have such a good day. I remember a time not so long ago when Cisco needed to talk about software. Like that's what the company was doing. But you're doing a lot. Chuck, what is the perspective that we need to have on both the disruptive possibility and the destructive potential of AI and how to thrive with all that going on?
Well, first of all, thanks everybody for being here today. We appreciate you spending time with us. And hopefully you'll enjoy a break before we have our discussion with Jensen to wrap things up a little bit later. Look, I think that having lived through the .com era, and I'm assuming some people in here have, although I found myself the other day talking about a mainframe and half the room was looking at me like I was crazy. But I think the bottom line is you can either watch this thing, you can embrace the change, or you can get run over by it. And I just don't think that watching is an option. And I think what we heard from everybody today, all those great speakers, G2, you did a great job putting the lineup together. John, we did an interview with John this morning to start, and he said he looked at G2 and said, G2, you assisted Chuck in putting this thing together. And I was sitting there thinking to myself, I actually assisted G2 in putting this thing together. But I just think it's important. I think you don't have a choice but to embrace it. And I think those, you know, we've heard a lot of people say that the people you have to worry about are taking your job. You have to worry about someone who uses AI more effectively than you taking your job. And I think that's true of companies, I think it's true of countries, I think it's true everywhere. I think that if you don't embrace it, figure out how to utilize it, how to use it effectively. You know, I talked to my CEO peers and the fear of being disrupted by your competition that figures something out before you do is real.
G2, Chuck said it. So build on it here. This is the second year that Cisco has convened this AI summit, and something tells me you did this because you're learning something from it. And however you have used this over the past year that led you to want to do another one would probably inform folks in the room how to think about what we're about to hear from Jensen, and then beyond that, how to really use what's been learned here today in preparing for '27. How did you use it?
Look, the reason we do this is because on a day-to-day basis, all of us are so focused on the tactics of the business. And we're all kind of in operational roles and it's a very important thing that you have to do on a day-to-day basis. But sometimes it helps to just take a day, broaden the aperture and see what's happening. And that was the intent of today. And that's the intent of it. With the dialog that each one of you will have with each other during dinner and then hopefully what Jensen, who's a very big thinker, will come in and talk to Chuck about the evening as well. But I feel like there's a few things that at least we should start thinking about on how this really helps our organization. So, for example, just a few top of mind things that actually were really interesting that came out of it. The population demographic change actually makes AI really seductive and important rather than not. And, you know, as the younger population is going down in the world, it could actually help the aging population in a better quality of life. That was something that I'm not sure if it was part of everyone's calculus. The other thing that's actually been really interesting is last year, it almost felt like fantasy to say, you know, these coding tools are going to do it as quickly as they are now. By the way, what you're starting to see is the term 100% is being thrown out, not just by one or two people, but many, many people are starting to throw it out there. 100% of the code might be written by AI. And so I think you will see a shift in the way the technology is getting built. And then the other thing is it's not just about language models. I think physical AI is at the precipice. I think the way in which we build out these models are going to be really interesting. The way that the business models shift, the pricing changes, the economics of the entire industry are going to shift is going to be pretty meaningful that we have to all get prepared for, and whether or not we are consumers of the technology, we are builders of the technology, we are sellers of the technology, we are partners with other people. I think it's an ecosystem effort. And the reason we think that these conversations are important is because we can have technology companies just go in a walled garden by themselves and think that they're doing great work. When the absorption rate of this technology is actually not that good.
Yeah. So that's a really important dimension. You know, I can't get past the idea. And Chuck, as I've heard you guys talk about how this came together, this isn't an event that gets better by your prompt engineering. You and G2 aren't sitting in a room going, okay, well, what should we do? It's people, right? Which people do we need to get in the room to give the best insights. And then we're talking about when people leave this room getting together over dinner and making the right connections, and then coming back in and listening to people we're talking about, AI is great at coding right now, but one of the limiting factors is, are the people ready to embrace it in the right way to make it effective, or are the teams going to be too weak not to have enough trust and end up getting overrun? Chuck, how do you prepare and manage people in this environment when they become the X factor in whether the code, the AI actually becomes effective?
Well, I think if you heard what Fran said earlier, you have to create an environment where you tell people if you embrace it and use it, it's going to be good for you, even if you embrace it in a way that eliminates 50% of what you would normally do in your job. If someone's willing to do that, we're not going to get rid of them. We're going to keep them because they're that forward thinking. And I think that the people side of this whole thing, there's such an over-rotation on the automation and the job elimination. And it's going to make us all robots. And we're going to sit, what was heard a couple times ago, stare at the ocean, write poetry, whatever we're going to do. The reality is, the people interaction and the ability to lead people in the interactions and the proximity that you have to be to your teams and how they have to feel about you as leaders is probably going to accelerate over the next few years, and the expectation of leadership is going to be higher because of the uncertainty and all the rhetoric in the marketplace. If you think back to COVID, when we had so much uncertainty with what was happening in the world, we didn't know what was going on. People thought, you know, the world, we just don't know. Leadership and culture was so important during that time, and now we're entering into a wave where people are really uncertain. They don't know. So leadership and culture and communication, frequency of communication, transparency of communication and honesty is going to be more important than ever. And that's the human side. So it's a combination of the technology, the AI, and then the human EQ and leadership that are really going to define the winners, in my opinion.
