Like all Beats, this beat starts by logging into livestreaming, which as usual involves entering your email address twice because unlike every two-stage SSO system in the world, ours does not automatically pass the email on the initial redirection. It’s been like this forever and is obviously awful UX yet it never gets fixed.
Fran, the human Bobblehead, is in charge. Her hair is pretty amazing, it’s the $1500 version of the The Karen. Bobblehead says: Let’s get into it.
The topics today are Ai Ai Ai, the olympics, and some other stuff. Every other company on earth, talking AI means stock goes up. Cisco? Stock goes down. Maybe stop talking about AI guys.
As for AI? We are urgently focused on it, says the Bobblehead. Trust and responsible AI and grown up AI are what Cisco is going to focus on, obviously the secret sauce that's missing out there in companies that are growing and making money. As she does so, the stream seems to fall apart. Based on the comments, it was almost everyone. This happens multuple times but then clears up.
Bobblehead addresses how the ELT is totally not out of touch. She says that this weird idea that they are full of optimism and not seeing the day to day is just not true. Good to know.. They wanted to share that they actually are not out of touch. Notably, we are ten minutes in and no other ELT member has shown up to the Beat.
Enough about that, says Bobblehead, now she wants to talk about the Olympics and Paralympics. The filler guest today is some Paralympian.
Cut to video - a very long filler video of the French team patting themselves on the back. The actual theme for today appears to be "Filler."
The video is tedious. I am not in security, but kind of nearby, and they seem to be spending a lot of time counting the 450M individual “attacks” which they go on to switch to “security events.” This is a little like counting packets. It's silly and any customer I work with would make fun of us if they saw that.
The chat around this video has become uniquely terrible, unhinged, and cringey as the posters seek likes: “Like this if you hate hackers!! Thank you, Cisco, for protecting us from the bad people!!!” I didn't add those exclamation marks.
Bobblehead says she is thrilled by the video!
Somehow, the acronym for “Cisco Innovation Center” is “CXC.”
Twenty minutes in, finally another ELT person shows up. It’s Jonathan. He’s also excited. It’s a big deployment, I guess. Jonathan analogizes to it being like an Airbnb. The analogy makes so little sense I can’t recount it here.
Apparently, there are a lot of cameras. Private 5G is apparently making the cameras work. The impressive part of this is the cameras and drones. There is a second very long filler video.
Jonathan says he’s going to introduce three people but then introduces only two: Masum and Tom. Somehow, live feeds from these things, which we’ve all seen before, require 5G now. Ok.
I mentally tuned out. This guy couldn’t present anything clearly. He eventually passed off to Vikas, a man with uniquely dead eyes. Vikas literally reads a bland, generically written speech off his laptop: “Our product teams are super-excited about the incredible networking technologies we have built.” He hands off to Tom. Tom is a great speaker – great at saying nothing with a lot of words. Back to Jonathan, who passes it back to the Bobblehead. He's excited or something.
Maybe the problem here is these guys are excited about all kinds of things that don't make revenue.
Bobblehead is going to talk to the filler guest, a Paralympian. I decide to make more valuable use of my time by finishing up what morning coffee kicks off in the bathroom. While doing so, I can hear through the door that they’ve gone to yet another filler video.
Back to my laptop and bored, I look at the Q&A. Amazingly, it appears Cisco will make no money on all the gear that Jonathan described; it appears most will be coming back to the company as it was leased. Didn’t this company at one point know how to make money?
Video finally ends - running down the clock in full effect, we’re at 36 minutes in with nothing even remotely substantive. Bobblehead asks a few intro questions. The Paralympian is apparently a “Pavelka Expert,” which, on Googling, appears to be some kind of cult that’s been packaged up as an “enterprise wellness” scheme.
Bobblehead continues the shallow questions. Stef is charming but talks like she’s rehearsed her answers. Clock is counting down on content, of which there is none.
Back to the Q&A, some funny moments. Are they using Splunk? No (as a very long answer to distract from this fact). Is the Olympics using IPv6? Nope, all IPv4 only, blamed on the partners.
Back to Bobblehead. This olympics girl is cheerful, but so what? The chat is inspired. The chat here is evidence that most people are mo--ns, I guess, so there’s some takeaway lesson here.
Fran says they will invite her back again and again. She wants Stef to know her impact so she's going to "send her a copy of the chat."
Mortifying. I wouldn't send the Beat chat to anyone. I'd probably get all copies and burn them in an abandoned field at night lest any of our investors get a look at how bottom-tier our employees are.
Bobblehead hands off to Mark, our strategy officer. Mark also talks up the Olympics but then he also switches to talking about AI. He says, “we’re going to talk more about that today,” but we’re 49 minutes in, so don’t bet on it.
Mark hands off to someone to talk about “responsible” AI. It’s Dev, our chief legal officer. Surely she is an expert. Not really. A bunch of non-statements. She hands off to Anthony, who is coming to us from the bottom of a well. He bubbles up many sentences that don’t make much sense. Back to Dev - she’ll keep us updated, “given the time we have to wrap up."
Generally, when you've used filler to set up a low-effort meeting that burns tens of thousand of employee hours and this millions of dollars you don't highlight that it's been all filler.
Back to Bobblehead. She fields a question about Cisco converting to a software company. I’m honestly not sure which company these people work for. But then, from the chat, it is obvious that a lot of our coworkers are mentally unwell. Mark tries not to call the question id--tic. Then - in an exciting (in contrast) brief moment of non-scripted spontaniety, it’s Gary! Gary chimes in to reiterate that we sell a lot of hardware. Apparently people need to hear this.
A few last words from Bobblehead: we’re out of time (shocking). Some more thanks to the Olympic team. Bobblehead asks employees to fill out the "Great Place to Work" survey, something no one outside of P&C has ever seen. Something about breakdancing. That’s it.