Cisco's AI Transformation Journey From Fragmented Systems To Smarter Workflows

Episode notes

What does AI transformation actually look like inside one of the world's largest engineering organizations? At Team '26 in Anaheim, I recently sat down with Jason Andrews to unpack how Cisco transformed decades of fragmented tooling, disconnected workflows, and spreadsheet-driven operations into a unified system of work built around Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, automation, and AI-ready workflows. And honestly, this conversation felt refreshingly practical. Jason oversees engineering operations across Cisco Networking, a business unit with around 22,000 engineers and product managers representing roughly $40 billion in annual revenue. So when he talks about transformation, this isn't theory. This is operational change happening at enterprise scale. We discuss how Cisco consolidated more than 85 Jira instances, reduced tooling spend by 54%, and accelerated reporting by 40x while creating a far more scalable engineering organization. But as Jason explains throughout the conversation, the real challenge was never the technology itself.

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