Cisco to Shed Jobs for All-In AI Push - WSJ

Ah, Cisco has decided to follow the grand tech tradition: sack thousands of workers to 'invest in AI.' Because nothing says 'all-in on the future' quite like showing the door to the people who built your present. The restructuring will cost up to $1 billion — which, conveniently, is also roughly the amount of severance you'd need for several thousand employees, so at least the maths checks out.

Cisco, which once proudly described itself as the company that 'makes the internet work,' now makes it work by... not employing the people who made it work? The company says it's reallocating resources to AI, silicon, optics, and security. Translation: we're laying off humans to buy more GPUs. The $1 billion price tag includes severance and facility costs, but honestly, it's a bargain compared to the PR hit of admitting you're automating your own workforce.

Of course, Cisco is hardly alone — this is the same dance we've seen at Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and so on. The pattern is now so predictable that you could train a small language model to write the press release: 'We are making the difficult but necessary decision to...' etc. The difference is that Cisco is doing it with the swagger of a company that once defined networking, now desperately trying to catch the AI wave. One wonders if the laid-off employees will get a discount on the AI tools that replaced them. Probably not.