Cisco Rethinks Hybrid Workplace Design Around People and AI

Hey everyone, we're here in Austin, Texas, at Webex One with our Techstrong TV coverage of this event. I want to introduce you to this gentleman here to my right. His name is Christian Bigsby.

That's correct. I got it right. You did indeed.

And, Christian, first of all, welcome to Techstrong TV. I know you've never been on here before. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thanks for the invite. Thanks for joining us at Webex One. You know what?

I was telling here some of the folks, this is my third Cisco conference, I think since Live, Cisco Live. I did Cisco Live. I was in Denver two weeks ago for Splunk, Splunk Conf, which was great, and now here for Webex One.

Welcome to the fold. Yeah. Welcome to the fold.

I love it. It's funny, well specifically with Webex, many years ago, Aruna Ravichandran, when she was at Computer Associates, we used to work a lot together. com then, and I was so looking forward to seeing her here.

And then I'm Facebook friends with her, and I see she writes on Facebook. Yeah. And I was like, "Oh, darn, I missed her," but we got you instead, so it was a good trade.

Yeah. You just let a couple of players to be named later. Christian, so if you wouldn't mind, share with our audience a little bit of your background.

Sure. So I'm a designer by training, actually. Yeah.

And I say that in a physical space and experience designer. I studied that at university. I've been in the business now of real estate facility services and design since 1991, so it's been a while.

Okay. Multiple generations worth of work. I've worked as a project manager, as a designer, as a real estate agent, as a real estate broker, real estate manager, property manager, et cetera.

So I actually started as a stonemason and- Really? and worked in a food truck. Those are my two sort of formative jobs that I had in there.

So, and mind you, the food truck was when food trucks were cool. Yeah, no, exactly. Before '91 really they didn't have food trucks.

Exactly right. So yeah, but I'm a designer by training and have been in the sort of the human experience world now ever since around, not just how we stand up buildings, but how we actually manage those and service the people to use those buildings. I love it.

So everyone has a title though, right? And Cisco has unique titles in many ways. Yes.

What exactly is your title? So my title is the Senior Vice President of Workplace Resources, which is a bit of a glamorous name. It's really real estate facilities management.

So my remit and my team's remit is all of our real estate transactions for the footprint of the company, all of our energy management, all of our maintenance, property management services, EHS construction design. So basically, if it's a physical footprint issue, it falls inside of my team's remit. To a lot of our folks out here, first of all, a lot of them don't even go to offices anymore, right?

Let's be real. But even those who do say, "Sounds like a cushy job," right? I don't know if they really realize the footprint we're talking about with a company like Cisco.

If you wouldn't mind, and without getting us in trouble for saying anything out of school, let's talk about that footprint because it's not even a bear print. It's like a dinosaur print. Yeah.

So we operate about 300 sites. Now that can be a little misleading because you're everything from sites that house 15,000 to 16,000 people are in a city unto themselves, all the way to 13 people in a technology office somewhere doing engineering, product research, and other. So huge range inside of there.

But it's scattered across about 90 countries inside of this. Wow. And, it's mostly every place Cisco operates within reason.

It's somewhere in the neighborhood of about 15 million square feet. It waxes and wanes regularly based on mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations, but 15 million square feet. So it's a small city, if you want to call it that, that we operate globally.

So, but we are on, I'd like to say all continents, but we don't have a site on Antarctica, so other than Antarctica- Today ... today. You never know.

We never know. You never know where data centers may go next, but, as of right now, we office workers, office locations, laboratories, computer laboratories, limited number of data centers, et cetera. So we're scattered across the globe and in a lot of centers of excellence and the centers of expertise.

So that's a job. Yeah. That's a job.

That's a 24/7 remit. Luckily, you probably have an inside track on some good networking gear. Yeah, there's this company that I've worked for- Oh ...

the last almost nine years now that is pretty good when it comes to technology stack, whether it's networking or it's security or it's collab devices, and hopefully we're going to get to show you a fair amount of that this week while you're here. Yeah. Well, I might as well say it now.

We, later this afternoon, are going over here to the Austin office, and we're going to give a little bit of a showcase, I assume. We'll be walking you through those floor plates and- Look forward to it ... see what we do to showcase our tech.

But all kidding aside, I said you have an inside track on networking. It's more than networking. It's this whole connected world that Cisco's been talking about for 15 years, maybe more.

Yes. Right? Back when I was in the dot com days and we were a Cisco certified shop, they talked about connecting the world.

Of course, Webex, when that came out, I'm going to guess that had to be, what, about 12 years ago? 10? Webex dates back further than that.

It was an acquisition. I remember the acquisition. 20-some years now.

I'm trying to remember the exact year. I couldn't give you the founding year on the- More than 20. Yeah.

You're making me feel old. But in any event, what I find really fascinating is if you go back 15 years, Cisco probably had a similar footprint, I would bet- Yeah ... in terms of offices, and Webex was a great way of connecting office to office.

Yep. Right? Three offices, four offices.

You probably didn't have global pandemic on the bingo card, though, right? And of course, that had to have an impact here. Yeah, it did.

That was a generational shift that typically you'd see a business cycle take 10 to 12 years of how people use offices, what an office feels like, what work practice feels like. We got a notification in about 24 hours that it was happening, and then I like to say in the year and three months that we were in hard lockdown, we saw 10 plus years of change in 15 to 16 months, and it is really hard to get your footy when that happens. I will say, as a tribute to Cisco, because of our tech and because of our network capabilities and security operations, we were actually able to turn that switch to send our employees home in less.

" So we have to be careful not to take for granted that as a tech native company that's so good at the network, we were able to distribute our teams just like that. We didn't have a moment of shutdown. " And Webex was a huge tool to keep the people connected.

But don't forget that the network itself is what allowed- Webex just runs on top of it. Exactly. Without the network, it's- Exactly ...

a lot of nice cameras. Exactly. And this is truly a case of whether you want to call it drinking your own champagne, eating your own dog food, whatever.

This Cisco themselves, thank God you had this, and so there wasn't much of a hiccup. But beyond Cisco, your entire customer base- Yes ... also was able to carry on.

That's correct. Right? And this was, you had people working at home on their daughter's laptops, and trying to do it securely and installing software.

But yet Life finds a way, as they say in "Jurassic Park," right? And people figured it out using Webex. Well, we were incredibly effective at making sure our customers could still connect securely from anywhere.

They could work securely from anywhere. So whether you were on a device, to your point, on someone's borrowed computer, just trying to dial in, or God forbid, you were dialing in. I was going to say, we didn't dial in, Edward.

Please don't do that. I'm hearing the- Yeah. the modem's noise.

But the ability to connect from anywhere, no matter how unprepared you were from remote working, we were able to turn that on incredibly quickly for our customers. " So it was an incredible tribute as a moment for the company. " How it affects the real estate world, how it affects the facilities world, how it affects how our people work.

We saw employees relocating to different locations. Yes. Which meant the network had to get stronger and stronger in more remote settings, as it was no longer just connecting critical cities.

Right. Same way you say connecting site to site used to be city to city, but making sure that that rural coverage, which fortunately for us was a huge part of what we were doing, which was rural coverage. So that became a very real motion for us out of the market.

Absolutely. The whole digital nomads and all of that. But thank God we got a handle on COVID.

We move past it, hopefully. We have moved past it. But you can't go back.

So you can't put your toe in the same water twice, right? You can't go back to the way it was. We live in a different world now.

We live in a hybrid world. Some people are all in the office, some people are at home, some people do back and forth. How has this affected the mission- Sure ...

and the roadmap, quite frankly? Well, the mission is still to make sure that the best people can do their best work, right? So wherever that is, you'd almost put the location agnostic on top of that, which is great people can do their absolute best work from anywhere, and that's always kind of been our view.

And look, we have a bit of a benefit and a bit of an advantage in Cisco because we don't just have a technology structural advantage in this. We're native to the idea of distributed work. We have always had people scattered city to city.

" So we had a head start inside of that. But what we found as we brought people back is that we shouldn't mistake the two different types of change for happening here at the same time. And that is, there is a linear change, to your point, that people aren't going to give up 100% of that freedom.

If they've moved, they've changed, they've understood how to work from home effectively on certain days, that gives them some choice. People don't typically relinquish their choices. But there's definitely a cyclical component to this, of people will be by themselves or be a bit more remote and then miss that human connection and come back on occasion.

And we want to make sure that bringing them back together to do that great work is done with the right sort of designs. And those designs, I'm not talking about architectural designs. I'm talking about experience design of why do we want people in a place?

And we always come back to four things. Complex problem-solving is still done better in person. Do people like the idea of being in a place they get all the problems out on the table, and now let's solve the problem?

The second one is the speed of collaboration. " So speed of collaboration. Early to company or early in career, the idea of the younger or the newer people to the enterprise, understanding how to meet people and how to connect and grow that network, best done in person.

And then lastly is how do you adopt to the culture? How do you understand how we deal with conflict and others? So that in person is still the best value.

" How would you even design that? Yeah. Right.

That's it. The nature of work is so nonlinear and is so asymmetric to do this. And still changing.

AI now is totally changing that as well. That's right. But now comes another hard part, though.

And Christian, this is unique to your role. So you got that mission, right? Make a unique place that works for these people.

But I got to do that in a market where interest rates are rising, different office space vacancies are changing, et cetera. You've got to almost take these external business factors and factor them into what's the best Cisco. Right.

Right? How do you do that? Well, so there's always the economic battle of keeping space current, keeping space relevant, keeping space inspirational, so that when people come to these places, they say, "This is a great experience.

" It sounds a little romantic, but the office is a physical manifestation of the company, of the culture of the company. So the idea of being able to take a physical space and make it branded to your company is still relevant. But the economics of that now are, we don't need the same amount of desk space as we once needed.

So the way you make it work in a higher cost market is if you start with 100,000 square feet and 90% of it is dedicated for offices that don't get used the same way, you double the conference room space, you reduce the amount of office space, and you can pay for the new by concentrating your offering to less square footage. So that idea of coming out of a market where we don't need three floors in a building, we can now do two, that is a very real thing where concentrating the offering for the people gives them a richer experience. I was going to say, a better experience, a more, not family, but family experience.

Right? We're here in this together, while recognizing you shouldn't pay for just all that empty space. That's correct.

Last kind of topic for you, Christian, is I mentioned AI. You can't not factor AI into your plans today. You'd be a fool.

Yes, absolutely. And I know the folks at Cisco are not fools. How does AI play into your whole world right now?

So there's a complicated way, and there's a simple way. The simple way I will start with is that we should be starting with the AI tools where the humans actually can't do the work as well, and not trying to replace people. That should never be the goal inside of this.

So the way I start with this is we are putting AI tools into some of our building monitoring systems to notice how many of the air handling units have vibration in the bearings, which says it's probably time to replace those pieces of kit, instead of sending mechanics out to check because there's too many air handling units for any one mechanic to look at. So using AI on that end to help us with that. Where it will get to, though, is that way, similar to the way I'm describing the concentration of the office, the worker in the maintenance team can concentrate their work where they're not doing all the diagnostics, they're actually doing the work.

So they're not filling out work orders. They're actually going into the space because they know with good credibility that those are the seven rooftop air handling units that need to be repaired, replaced, or in some way turned off or started back up, because the data is telling us that, and good quality AI tools are telling us that. Where it will get to that's even more exciting is imagine where we can take AI to build a demand forecasting tool.

Because when I say demand, I'm not talking about how many seats I need. I'm talking about how many people are going to show up today, how much food they're going to consume, how many times the housekeeping team needs to be deployed, how much we need to heat or cool the building to prepare. I was going to- That is where we can get rid of waste, make it easier for my team on the supply side, but most importantly, a better experience for the people actually occupying the space.

I agree with you. And I don't want to put tools at the, what I'll call the ritual end. I don't want them replacing the guy that makes an unbelievable pizza in the cafeteria.

I want it instead to spend its time forecasting how many pizza materials they needed to order so that the stock is there. I do still get my grease. Just make pizza.

Exactly right, and be really good at it, and you have everybody feel like Troy is the best pizza maker, or Cozy is the best pizza maker, can do that for us. I agree. Until we have robotic pizza makers, but that'll be for a couple years from now.

It'll be a little bit. They'll do that. Anyway, Christian, I want to thank you for coming here on Techstrong TV.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. As I said right in the beginning when we spoke about it, it's a job.

Yeah, it is a job. There's a lot to look over here. It's a special cult of people that we work with in the facilities business, but thank you for the time.

Thank you, sir. Thanks. Pleasure.

Thanks. We're here at Webex One. We're going to be back with more coverage.

Stay tuned. You're watching Techstrong TV.