Chuck Robbins has a unique perch from which to observe American businesses and their anxieties and approaches to artificial intelligence. As chairman and CEO of the tech giant Cisco, he leads a company that’s helping AI hyperscalers build their networks. Since January 2024, he’s also served as chair of the Business Roundtable (BRT), an association for more than 200 CEOs of America’s largest and most powerful corporations—a role he’ll relinquish at the end of this year. In an interview with Modern CEO, he reflected on his accomplishments leading BRT, his role as a sounding board for fellow chief executives, and what he makes of the current calls for a slowdown in AI. Edited excerpts follow.
Modern CEO: What would you say has been a capstone accomplishment during your tenure as chair of the Business Roundtable?
Chuck Robbins: I think the progrowth tax reform we worked on early in the administration was a capstone accomplishment. And then I’d say, in the last six months, we have also played a meaningful role in [helping] the business community [with] digesting the pace and dynamic environment that AI has brought to bear. For example, [when Anthropic’s Mythos dropped] just before one of the Business Roundtable quarterly meetings, [Citi CEO] Jane Fraser suggested we convene a discussion the following Wednesday morning for anyone who wanted to attend. It [included] me, Jane, [Visa CEO] Ryan McInerney, my chief security and trust lead, and a representative from a major bank. We had a very robust discussion for a 7:30 a.m. meeting. More than 100 CEOs showed up.
MC: What are other CEOs asking you about AI, and how are you answering?
CR: There are two categories of questions. Because Cisco was one of the original 11 Project Glasswing participants, our teams have an advanced view of these models, their capabilities, and how to deploy them internally to validate and test code. So CEOs ask us how they should think about model risk, open models, open-source and open-weight models, Chinese models, and U.S. models.
The second category I would say is, “How do you think about AI from a productivity perspective?” But really, they’re asking, “What is Cisco doing that I should make sure we’re doing?” The most innovative companies in the world shouldn’t view this as a cost-reduction efficiency play. You should view this as an innovation enhancement play. You can do exactly what you’re doing today, perhaps with 20% fewer people—and I’m making that number up. Or you can do 20% more and deliver more innovation to your customers with the same number of people you have today.
At Cisco, the clearest areas [for using AI] are coding and customer service. With coding, we have learned that if you let AI go unchecked, you may get a lot of code, but the bottleneck moves from writing code to verifying it, and eventually to customers’ ability to deploy the innovation.
On the customer service side, we’ve deployed personalized agent technology for every employee in the company. It’s a bit of an automated way of helping our employees do things in a bunch of different ways. Our sales teams use it a lot. Your ability to prepare for a constructive meeting with a customer utilizing these agents is so different than it would have been three, four years ago. The research you have to do—connecting what’s happening in their business to the capabilities and solutions we have—you can do that in just a fraction of the time through your personalized agent.
MC: What kind of mindset or cultural shift do you think [the world’s largest enterprises] need to make the leap to AI as a tool to enable innovation? It seems like companies need to think about themselves as being in a constant state of transformation.
CR: I think, first of all, if you’re an employee who is uncomfortable with a lot of change and a constant dynamic environment, nothing’s going to feel good right now. The pace of change is too fast, too dynamic, and they’re going to have to figure out their role in this world we’re living in. For most companies, there are going to be industry leaders setting the pace, and you have no choice but to at least keep up. Given the attendance we saw at that early-morning [BRT] meeting, and the questions that they were asking, it’s clear that every CEO is concerned about how fast [AI] is moving and whether they’re keeping up and whether they have the cyber [capabilities] to defend their companies.
In mid-September, after we spoke to Robbins, AI executives began calling for the industry to slow development of the technology. We went back to Robbins and asked for his take. He provided this written response:
CR: We’re seeing incredible progress in AI, and when the people building the most advanced models are raising questions about the pace of development, we should listen.
But I don’t think the most important question for our customers is whether the frontier models move faster or slower. They’re deploying AI today and want to know they can do that safely, securely, and within cost controls—regardless of which model they choose. Whether AI speeds up or slows down, our job is to make sure customers don’t have to choose between moving fast and moving safely.
I’m biased, of course, but that’s where we think the network becomes strategically important. The network can see how AI agents and applications are behaving, what they’re connecting to, what data they’re accessing, and, critically, enforce what they’re allowed to do. So rather than relying solely on a model to behave as intended, you can put controls into the infrastructure around it—which also can help control costs of token usage. That’s what we’re building for our customers today.
So, I’m less focused on whether the industry should broadly “slow down” and more focused on giving customers the visibility, security, control, and efficiency they need to move with confidence.
MC: Affordability has become a key issue in the upcoming midterm elections. Is affordability a business issue, and how do you see American corporations contributing positively to the solution?
CR: Obviously, it’s an issue. If you think back to 2017, we first became involved in homelessness in Silicon Valley and expanded [our efforts] beyond homelessness because cost of living was one of the causes of homelessness—it wasn’t the only cause, but when you visit an encampment and meet someone who sleeps in a tent, gets up every day, goes to work, and sends her daughter to school, that is an affordability situation. You have to have places where teachers, firefighters, and other people who serve the community can afford to live and raise families. What the business community should do is care enough to sit down and look at public-private possibilities to actually solve whatever issue exists**.** And hopefully the public sector leadership in the geography in which you’re operating is also open to finding pragmatic solutions.
MC: What are you hearing from BRT members about the perception of brand USA globally? And are there things that the Business Roundtable can do to bolster the way the rest of the world thinks about it?
CR: Some countries do view the United States differently today than they did a few years ago, and in many cases that affects how they interact with American companies. In technology, the whole notion of sovereign solutions is coming at you fast and furious—not only data [sovereignty] but control over cloud applications as well as privacy-related issues. Most countries aren’t going to have champions within every industry. If those champions are U.S.-based companies, then [other countries] have to decide, “Who do I trust to help me solve some of these problems?” From Cisco’s perspective, it’s helpful that we’ve been very active in investing in the communities where we operate around the world. We’ve built a level of trust around the world.
MC: What is the future of globalism?
CR: To my point earlier, some countries and continents do not have domestic intellectual property in certain areas of technology, and they’re going to have to lean on [U.S.-based companies]. I think we’re going to see the benefits of what we’ve had historically, with a filter of self-reliance, a nationalist view, resiliency—and not just resiliency of supply chain or natural disasters but also geopolitical dynamics.
Amid calls to increase AI regulation and safeguards, Robbins says he sees Cisco’s job as ensuring that customers don’t have to choose between moving fast and moving safely. What is your response to recent warnings—and those who say those concerns are overblown? I’d love to hear your thoughts via email: stephaniemehta@mansueto.com.
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